Malorie Blackman
The Upper World by Femi Fadugba asks a fundamental question – does our fate lie within our own hands or is it already set from the moment we are born? It is the story of Esso who is trying to survive the day, and Rhia whose story takes place 15 years in the future. Their lives are intertwined in a strange, fascinating way. I love the way the story explores quantum physics, temporal theories and characters with real concerns – all in a very accessible way. The Upper World is a thought-provoking, provocative and entertaining read.
Natasha Brown
My literary pick is the essay collection Black Looks by bell hooks. In this book, hooks combines pop culture, history and academia into a wide-ranging analysis of Black representation in the media. Although originally published in 1992 as an “academic text”, I found the writing style fresh and engaging. In fact, much of the commentary felt eerily relevant to today’s cultural landscape. After reading it, I found myself looking at things differently — and I think it takes a special book to alter how we see the world.
Benjamin Zephaniah
Recently, I’ve loved The Master of Chaos and Other Fables by Pauline Melville, who is of British-Guyanese descent. She started life as an actor and comedian and is also very well-travelled, so she does multiculturalism with ease. This collection of 14 short stories starts in Guyana, and takes you around the world via Syria and Russia. Short stories have never really been my thing, but this was just right for me at this busy time of life. There is love, politics, compassion, magic, and humour, which all ends with a very touching story of a homeless man who stumbles across the horror at Grenfell Tower.
Jade LB
I can hear everyone that knows me rolling their eyes because I think I talk about it pretty much every day. I genuinely think, much like Chimamanda’s Why We Should All Be Feminists, everyone should read bell hooks’s All About Love as required reading at school age. I found it disarming, confronting and intelligent. I picked it up believing I’d be affirmed and validated in my ideas of myself as a “loving” woman, and have more fire to slew unloving men with, but I’ve come away from the text confronted by how much more work I’ve got to do still on my own heart.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Raymond Antrobus’s second collection, All the Names Given, is equal parts tender and masterful. Antrobus offers intimate takes on what it might mean to love – up close, or at a distance – deftly using language to dismantle the silence which usually resides where language cannot suffice. The collection contains a sequence of poems, “Closed Captions”, which offer a fresh take on that we can see and that we cannot. Each poem in the collection quietly bursts through with warmth, beauty and honesty. A must read.
Bolu Babalola
The words in the Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni are sultry and sharp and rhythmic, hooking into your soul. One of my favourites is unsurprisingly, a love poem, “The Way I Feel”, brimming with sensuality and joy and the life of love.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
I think everyone needs to read Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine at least once. I love this book. It is poignant and powerful, and I love the mix of poetry and essay, of pictures/photos and lyricism. I am always blown away by this author’s work. It is so honest, unbearably so, and full to the brim of beauty. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is both classic and contemporary and it covers so many themes, love and loneliness, family, death, health, grief, and race. I found myself whew-ing at the pages, resting, coming back for more.
Jasmine Lee-Jones
The Grey Album by Kevin Young is a dizzying exploration and excavation of a Black American storytelling tradition. It circumvents the atrocities of white colonial erasure to arrive at a deeper, spiritual truth that exemplifies the necessity for concrete historical records on what has been stolen not only from African-Americans, but members of the African diaspora globally. It is doused in blues and jazz and hip hop, and somehow manages to be as compellingly musical as the storytelling tradition it describes.
Alex Wheatle
I was recently reduced to tears by Nadifa Mohamed’s incredibly powerful The Fortune Men. The author paints a cinemascope vision of early 1950s Tiger Bay, and she unearths the hidden history of a great miscarriage of justice. She wonderfully describes the racism and colonial arrogance of the day. For me, Black History Month was made for narratives like The Fortune Men.
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