Books 8 

Stop telling yourself you're trapped in an identity crisis. Others around you in multiethnic Britain - the Irish, Scots, Welsh and others - know who they are. And enjoy reading about life and problems they can identify with. You're not trapped; you just haven't found the door yet.

Get focused
Start with collections of essays that explore the literary scene. Published anthologies that have centred on Literature by Black Writer's include

• IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, (Penguin)
• Bittersweet (Women's Press)
• The Fire People (Payback Press)
• AfroBeat (Pulp Faction)
• Black British Culture and Society (Routledge)
• Voices of the Crossing (Serpent's Tail)

Search by author
Major writers, editors, academics and publishers include

• Patsy Antoine
• Buchi Emecheta
• Catherine Johnson
• Pete Kalu
• Jackie Kay
• Roi Kwabena
• E. A. Markham (Sheffield Hallam University)
• Courttia Newland
• Steve Pope
• Dr.Ato Quayson (Cambridge University)
• Dorothea Smartt
  

Lives that have the power for greatness
Patsy Antoine is a freelance editor and writer who has worked in the book and magazine publishing industry for over 13 years. She was one of three industry professionals commissioned to judge the 1997 Saga prize. In 1998 she was commissioned by independent book publishing company Pulp Faction to compile and edit Afrobeat: an anthology of new black British writing. Antoine lives in London with her husband and daughter and is currently at work on her first novel.

Buchi Emecheta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, She arrived in London to join her husband in the late 1950's. Years later, as a struggling mother of five by the age of 23, she published her first novel, a book of her observations, entitled In The Ditch by the age of 25. Today, Emecheta is the most prominent Black woman writer in England and one of only a handful of African women published writers in the world.

Throughout her 30-year writing career she has written fourteen novels, children's books and a television drama. She has received several awards including the Best British Writer's Award for Joys of Motherhood, the Daughter of Mark Twain Award for Second Class Citizen, and the Jock Campbell Award for The Slave Girl. She received an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and is a Fellow of the University of London. She has also had a film made about her life and novel, Double Yoke, and a street named after her in the London B orough of Lambeth.

Mahlete-Tsige Getachew was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in November 1979, but has lived in London for most of her life. She studied politics at Somerville College, Oxford, and is finishing an MPhil in philosophy at King's College, Cambridge. Her areas of interest are aesthetics, mind, ethics and politics; within these subjects she studies the Ancient Greeks, Marxism, and the existentialists. She has had work published in 'The Guardian', 'Literary Review', and IC3, and won national poetry and short story awards. She is currently working on her first novel - Femme Fatale - and last year was short-listed for The Voice Model of the Year award.

Catherine Johnson studied film at St. Martins School of Art, only taking up writing after the birth of her children. Since 1993 she has written seven novels for young adults, the latest is Hero (OUP) set in multicultural Georgian London. In 1996 she won an Arts Council writers bursary and her short stories for adults have been widely anthologised, most recently in IC3. She has also been commissioned to write for BBC Radio 4 and for the Welsh Film Foundation. She is Black Literature Worker at Centerprise, a community group in Hackney, London. She recently received a Royal Literary Society Fellowship for 2002.

Pete Kalu works part-time for small press, Crocus Books. He has overseen the publishing of numerous anthologies of black writing including: Dim Sum: British Chinese short stories; Healing Strategies For Women At War: Seven Black Women Poets; KISS: Modern Black Love Poetry. Under his own imprint, mongrel press, he has published poetry pamphlets The Devil's Lunchbox (John Siddique) Mongrel Moon (Peter Kalu) Sky Mountain (Tang Lin) as well as the poetry anthologies CDs 'Heart Voice Soul', Seven Sisters and a series of 'Listening Post' black poetry and prose CDs.

Roi Kwabena was born in Trinidad & Tobago in 1956. As a cultural activist, he has lectured, performed and conducted workshops at the request of numerous governments, city councils, universities, schools, libraries and cultural bodies across the Caribbean, and Africa. Thousands of youngsters and adults have benefited from his offerings. Many of his publications are considered vital reference materials for understanding diverse cultural experiences. Over the years, Roi has worked as a consultant on projects for sustainable development, cultural literacy, Black history, and human resource management and community development for prominent international organisations.

Hope Massiah is a Barbados born, London bred writer. She has worked as a teacher, nanny, equal opportunities trainer, researcher and management consultant. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, including IC3, Bittersweet, and Playing Sidney Poitier. She is currently working on a musical theatre project for Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Karen McCarthy was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. She is editor of the critically acclaimed anthology Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry (The Women's Press, 1998), which toured nation-wide and achieved widespread coverage across a range of media including Woman's Hour, 'The Guardian', 'Independent on Sunday', 'Express' and 'Time Out'. Karen has worked in publishing and the media for over 10 years as a writer, publicist, broadcaster and editor.

Channel 4 commissioned her first television screenplay, 'Keeping Up with Ms Jones' and she is currently compiling a short fiction anthology showcasing the work of emerging black and Asian women writers, again for The Women's Press.

Courttia Newland is the author of two acclaimed novels, The Scholar and Society Within and is currently working on his third. He has been featured in a double page spread in 'The Sunday Times' magazine, 'The Evening Standard's', "ES" magazine and featured in 'Company' magazine's hot new writers. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies, Disco 2000(Sceptre), Vintage New Writing 8 (Vintage), Afrobeat (Pulp Fiction), Rites of Spring: New London Writing (4th Estate), Playing Sidney Poitier and other stories (SAKS Publications) and The Time Out Book of London Short Stories. He is co-editor of IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain.

He has been commissioned to write The Scholar as a screenplay and he has also written plays including an adaptation of 'Euripides' The Women of Troy', which was also highly rated at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival. His latest play, The Far Side opens at The Tricycle Theatre later this year.

Koye Oyedeji is from South London, a former press officer who won two prizes in 1998 for his fiction. He has seen his work published in several anthologies, which include The Fire People and more recently IC3. In 1999 he performed at The Ritz Cafe with the Brothaman collective and is soon to be collaborating with dance musicians on a spoken word compilation. Currently, he is completing his degree in media and journalism as well as freelancing for 'Darkerthanblue.com' and the 'New Nation' newspaper.

Steve Pope was born in Barbados and studied Journalism at the University of Westminster before starting on a ten-year career in journalism. A former Editor of 'The Voice' newspaper he currently writes for the 'New Nation' and other national newspapers. He started 'The X Press', which is Europe's largest publisher of black fiction in 1992 with former Voice music editor Dotun Adebayo. He has been involved with many project connected with black writing over the last nine years and is currently working on forging better links between black British and American publishers.

Kadija (George) Sesay is a literary activist, working as a literature consultant and coordinator. She is the director of a small press, SAKS Publications that publishes anthologies, Burning Words, Flaming Images: poems short stories by writers of African descent (1996) and Playing Sidney Poitier and other stories. She has edited two other anthologies, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (1993) and co-edited IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain with novelist, Courttia Newland.

She also co-ordinates the Writers' HotSpot that organises trips for writers abroad. She is a George Bell Fellow and the General Secretary for African Writers Abroad (PEN). She has previously received a Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement Award (1994), Candace Woman of Achievement Award (1996), The Voice Community Award for Literature (1999) and has been nominated as a Woman of the Year by the Millennium Festival of Women's Work (2000).

Dorothea Smartt is a poet, writer and live artist. She was Brixton Market's first Poet-in-Residence, and a former Attached Live Artist at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Awarded several commissions and bursaries, she's a member of the Black Arts Alliance and an Afro-Style School 'graduate'. Her work draws on her experience of being born in England and raised with her Barbadian family heritage, exploring issues of identity, belonging, bereavement, and Black women's hair. Her evocative and spirited voice "coils up your feelings, around granite chips of truth...unwinds solace, in the most soothing volleys" [Caribbean Times].

Her poetry has featured in BBC's Windrush Season and on BBC/GLR, and appears in several groundbreaking anthologies, including Burning Words, Flaming Images (SAKS Media, 1996), Bittersweet (Women's Press, 1998), The Fire People (Payback Press, 1998), Mythic Women/Real Women (Faber, 2000), and IC3 (Penguin, 2000).

She lectures part-time at Birkbeck, University of London and performs nationally and internationally. In 2000 she was Kent County Council's Writer-in-Residence; a guest at the 7th International Conference of Caribbean Writers & Scholars (Puerto Rico); and of Howard University and the British Embassy (Washington D.C.). Her multi-media children's' play, 'Fallout' (Theatre Venture) is currently touring London schools, and has just published her first collection, Connecting Medium.

Joanna Traynor was born in London, raised in the north west of England and now lives in Devon. She won the Saga Prize in 1997 for her first novel Sister Josephine. Since then she has written two more novels, Divine and Bitch Money. Presently, she is working on a multicultural documentary for Carlton TV and continues work on her fourth novel.

Martin Glynn of Birmingham has gained a national and international reputation for his commissioned work in theatre, radio drama, live performance, and poetry, spanning a period of nearly 20 years. A passionate believer in making live literature accessible to all sections of the community, Martin has been conducting residencies in Prisons, Healthcare and educational settings, working with very disaffected people. Current work includes an adaptation of Richard Wright's 'Man of All work' for BBC Radio 4, a new poetry book entitled COVEIS, and a collection of short stories entitled Shadow People.

Books

"C L R James was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Born in colonial Trinidad in 1901, he divided his life between the Caribbean, America and Britain, dying in Brixton, London, in 1989. says Stephen Howe in the Independent weekend review...Hardly anyone in contemporary life and letters could match the range of James's activities. Revolutionary and aesthete, novelist, historian, critic, philosopher, political analyst and (in many eyes) the foremost of all writers on cricket, he brought a unified sensibility to all those spheres," he concludes.

The publishers say: "C L R James will be remembered for as long as cricket is played anywhere in the world, and yet, until now, there has been no rigorous attempt to record the many complexities of his intellectual career.

"Farrukh Dhondy, the Indian-born journalist and broadcaster, draws on his friendship with James, as well as his own involvement in British Black politics, to give authorities to this colourful story of his life. Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of James' birth in Trinidad, this biographer traces his long career and many reinventions."

Michael Glover, says in the Independent, the book "is a delightful, extended examination of a man who was himself a tissue of paradoxes: an avowed Leninist who always championed the values of Western civilisation; a man with boundless enthusiasm for political ideas who had no appetite and little talent for practical politics.

"No wonder that the steel bands played the International and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at his funeral in 1989."

James' obituarist in The Times, "his writing was to be part of the broad inspiration of many young intellectuals in the Caribbean, particularly his Black Jacobins. "In Britain he was the subject of much admiration, a Trotskyite sage with a group gathered around him, mostly young and black." Fellow Trinidadian and UK broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, writes in The Times that James' "championed the cause of West Indian self-determination" applauds James for his "campaign in the to end the the bizarre anachronism which dictated that only white West Indian captains should lead mainly black West Indian teams...Native resentment at what West Indians saw as a kind of racism were fanned by James's withering criticism."

Caribbean Militant in Harlem. W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner, eds., Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem, Collected writings 1920-1972. First Midland Book Edition 1992. Indiana University Press and Pluto Press. London.

Probably one of the most radical Harlem blacks of the 20th century, the career of Richard B Moore is one potent illustration of the life and tribulations of radical black immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean to the USA during the early decades of the 20th century.

Born in 1893 in Barbados Moore gravitated to Harlem, then the greatest black diaspora community the world. He was one among a small number of outstanding West Indian expatriates such as Marcus Garvey, W.A.Domingo, Claude McKay, Cyril Briggs, Otto Huiswoud and George Padmore who worked for four years in New York. Although they were few in number, they had an inordinate impact on local events. But their interests were without national boundaries. He shared fully and actively the preoccupations of this time as well as those of the black minority in America and the colonised majorities throughout the Caribbean.

The book closes another gap in the astonishing history of 20th century Afro-American nationalism One of Moore's accomplishments stands out: he fought against the "evil, pejorative use of the term 'Negro' and 'Black' by the public media in the United States. Persons born in the Americas of African descent should be more accurately referred to as Afro-Americans, he concluded.

His is one story that provides an essential window into the West Indian experience in America and the Caribbean. But in addition, Moore's life and collected works illuminate the general history of Afro-Americans: their long tradition of oratory, polemicism, newspaper publishing, and a strong moral outrage at the injustices of racism ,segregation, and discrimination.