Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Catch (2025), recently released in paperback, has a bizarre and intriguing premise: twin sisters who were separated at a young age, adopted into different families after their mother’s death, diverge in their reactions when one of them spots a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London, seemingly not aged at all and living as she might have had they never been born. 

Upon the book’s initial release last year, Danez Smith wrote for The New York Times, “Daley-Ward has penned a metaphysical experiment on grief, trauma, family and longing that holds all the excitement of a big summer read.” The Catch is the first novel from Daley-Ward, who has also published poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, including PEN Ackerley Prize winner The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir, and co-written Black Is King, Beyoncé’s 2020 musical film. 

The Catch is also the first title in the Well-Read Black Girl Books series under W.W. Norton’s Liveright imprint. 

The series came about as a collaboration between Liveright and Glory Edim, founder of the Well-Read Black Girl community, which began in 2015 as an online platform and book club and has since grown into a nonprofit organization and recognized name in the literary world. WRBG’s stated goal is “to introduce a cohort of diverse writers to future generations—contemporary authors who are non-binary, queer, trans, and disabled. To address inequalities and improve communities through reading and reflecting on the works of Black women.”

Edim said of the collaboration with Liveright, “Our new literary series is determined to introduce narratives that are innovative and beguilingly genuine. Daley-Ward’s writing fits the bill; the voices in her manuscript hovered over my head for days.” More recently, the series has seen the hardcover publication of I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For (2026) by Bsrat Mezghebe, set in Washington, DC’s Eritrean community as Eritrea is on the cusp of independence from Ethiopian rule in 1991.

The WRBG/Liveright project is one of many organized efforts in recent years to highlight and uplift underrepresented authors, during a time when book bans, which disproportionately affect queer, trans, and racially marginalized authors, have been on the rise.

A similar initiative is Tiny Reparations, founded in 2020 by comedian, writer, producer, and actor Phoebe Robinson in partnership with Penguin Random House’s Plume. Tiny Reparations has brought us LaToya Watkins’ family drama Perish (2022) and short story collection Holler, Child (2023), longlisted for the National Book Award; Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s essay collection Magical/Realism (2024), longlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; and the novel Fundamentally (2025) by Nussaibah Younis, an international bestseller shortlisted for the Women’s Prize—among other titles. 

Projects like this are an opportunity to shape the publishing landscape according to a particular vision. They are also an opportunity for publishers to grow and diversify their catalogs. As Robinson put it while launching her imprint, “We all know there is a lack of diversity in publishing. Tiny Reparations Books recognizes that the publishing landscape isn’t going to change until the actual work starts behind the scenes. I am thrilled to partner with Plume to help take this important step. And I look forward to bringing a wide range of voices to Plume and helping to push the boundaries of publishing.”

While the WRBG series and Tiny Reparations are newer developments, they are preceded by others with similar missions who have laid major groundwork in American publishing, such as HarperCollins’ 40-year-old Amistad imprint, “devoted to honoring the legacy of Black literature, amplifying the bold and unapologetic voices of today’s storytellers, and paving the way for inspiring Black-centered stories of the diaspora.” Amistad is the current publisher of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which fell out of print before becoming the household name it is today, and is also responsible for Pulitzer winner The Known World (2003) by Edward P. Jones and National Book Award finalist Another Brooklyn (2016) by Jacqueline Woodson.

Many readers of these and other well-known books may be unaware of the careful curation and intentional work that have made them possible or kept them in print. Seeing how imprints and smaller publishing projects operate within the larger publishing scene can foster appreciation for those who help titles reach their audiences, and following diversity-focused initiatives is a meaningful way to structure personal reading and book club discussions, all while supporting authors and staff.

Readers and book groups interested in keeping up with Well-Read Black Girl Books and related projects can follow Glory Edim’s newsletter. Amistad offers their own newsletter, and Tiny Reparations advertises new and upcoming titles on the PRH website. Other examples of publishing spaces that prioritize underrepresented writers are Random House’s One World, Hachette Book Group’s Legacy Lit, and Roxane Gay’s imprint at Grove Atlantic.

Selina Brown has been named the inaugural National Reading Hero recipient of the Queen’s Reading Room medal, a new literary award unveiled by Queen Camilla.

Brown, founder of the Black British book festival, will receive the honour in recognition of her work establishing Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature and bringing inclusive stories into primary schools in areas with low literacy rates.

Launched in 2025 in response to declining reading rates, the Queen’s Reading Room medal recognises people who “champion books and storytelling” across the UK.

Brown founded the Black British book festival in 2021, born of her frustration at being told her children’s book would not sell because it featured a Black girl on the cover. She launched the first event as a one-day festival; five years on, it has expanded into a year-round platform, hosting events at venues across the UK.

Through her Reading for Smiles programme, Brown has also introduced inclusive books into primary schools in underserved areas of the UK, and has opened two community libraries.

“As a young Black girl growing up in Britain, I found possibility in stories long before I saw it in the world around me. I built this from nothing. No network. No industry access. Just belief – and books,” Brown said.

“As a single mother of three, I put my own savings into a dream that Black British stories deserved a world-class stage,” she added. “To be named the inaugural National Reading Hero […] is beyond anything I imagined when I started. This medal belongs to every child who has ever searched for themselves in a story and not found it.”

Liz Waterland was also named Local Reading Hero for her volunteer work at Deepings Community Library in Lincolnshire over more than a decade, including securing 8,000 signatures on a petition when the library faced closure.

Waterland described the award as a “wonderful honour”, and an acknowledgment “of a lifetime spent helping to make reading accessible and enjoyable for people of all ages, wherever they may be”.

Brown and Waterland were among hundreds of nominations, which were whittled down by a judging panel featuring figures from across Britain’s literary landscape including Lady Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House UK; Jonathan Douglas, chief executive of the National Literacy Trust; Alison Tweed, chief executive of Book Aid International; Dan Conway, chief executive of the Publishers Association; Sarah Mears, programmes director at Libraries Connected; Nels Abbey, founder of the Black British Writers’ Guild; and the author Ann Cleeves.

“We have been overwhelmed by the extraordinary calibre of nominations received from every corner of the United Kingdom,” said Vicki Perrin, chief executive of the Queen’s Reading Room. “We are thrilled to unveil Selina Brown and Liz Waterland as our winners: Selina for her extraordinary impact on Black British literature and community development, and Liz for the brilliant nature of her work in Lincolnshire.”

The Queen’s Reading Room is a charity founded by Queen Camilla in 2023. It runs an online book club, festivals and other initiatives to promote reading.

Nominations for next year’s medal will open on 1 June and close on 1 October.

The unnamed narrator of Black Bag, an out-of-work actor living in London, has finally landed himself a role, and it’s a doozy. Advertised on the “admirably candid” website strange-acting-jobs.org, the role demands that he sit silent and unmoving at the back of a university lecture theatre for one whole term, dressed in nothing but a black leather bag. He will be paid in cash. He cannot believe his luck. “This is my big chance to do absolutely nothing, as thoroughly as possible.”

Black Bag is the hilarious new novel from Luke Kennard, a poet whose second collection made him the youngest ever nominee for the Forward prize in 2007, and whose debut novel was the similarly surreal and equally enjoyable The Transition. Both works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments.

The experiment here is based on a real-life one conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University. Goetzinger had one of his students attend classes for a semester dressed in a big black bag with only their feet showing, finding that over time the other students’ attitudes changed from hostility to acceptance to, eventually, friendship. Given enough exposure, it seems, we can come to accept anything.

Kennard’s hero is an affable millennial underachiever in his late 30s, scraping by doing unbearably worthy social issue plays that no one watches and lucrative murder-mystery dinner theatre for drunken plutocrats (he finds the latter “slightly less degrading”). Tired of his subsistence-level existence and yearning for a part he can play with conviction, he jumps at the chance to be Black Bag. The particularities are explained by the wonderfully bland Dr Blend, the course convener who is running the experiment. “Bag is to be characterless,” he notes. “The occasional involuntary movement will be allowed.” Impressed by Blend and his claim that they are “testing life itself”, the narrator promises to give it his absolute all. “About half should be sufficient,” observes Dr Blend.

As the experiment gets under way, the narrator enlists the help of his childhood friend Claudio, a successful livestreamer who immediately sees the possibilities for monetisation (Bag Coin, anyone?). Apparently, Black Bag chimes with something in the zeitgeist. “I think it’s a statement about being a man,” offers Claudio. “A rejection of the current options.” Black Bag also piques the interest of Justine Pearce, a post-humanist professor who wishes to strike up a relationship in aid of her research on “the coming technocracy”. “This is exactly what I want. To be comprehensively desired, with a key factor missing. I am a person. You are an absence. Ultimately, I would like to fuck nothing.” Meanwhile, the narrator grows increasingly attached to his bag, wearing it in his spare time, while in the background there are sightings of other Black Bags and talk of a secret bag society.

This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore. It is a campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship. But where Black Bag really cuts to the quick is in its forlorn depiction of modern – particularly millennial, particularly creative – life: the grotty flat, the visits to the parents (touchingly and imaginatively done), the constant rejection, the waning hope. The narrator knows, really, that he is never going to make it as an actor: “what terrifies me, Claudio, is that, in my heart of hearts, I am nothing more than an English suburbanite”. A realisation more frightening than any AI apocalypse.

Brandon Taylor’s third novel, following the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and 2023’s The Late Americans, is full of hands. It’s set in the years after a pandemic that made many people desperate “to touch and be touched”. Long before then, no one had ever held the hand of its chief character, a young painter called Wyeth – not even his mother. In the doldrums, he recalls a conversation with a printmaker who extolled lithography because the images it produces reveal the strength and dexterity of an artist’s fingers: human marks. Poring through a company’s digital files, he has a near-seizure when he comes across a handwritten ledger: “There was something almost romantic about the curves of the numbers, elegant and swooping.”

Wyeth was born in Virginia, a state where, within living memory, Black farmhands developed cancer because they weren’t given gloves to pick the tobacco that would later poison their blood. He grew up in a trailer park with his white mother, a nursing assistant. To be working class, fatherless and from the south: this was, for him, a kind of isolation chamber. It led him to imagine that “the future and history belonged to another species of human that did not include him and his family and their distant relations”.

Now he’s in New York. It’s summertime, meltdown time. Wyeth worries he ought to be out on the streets photographing righteous protesters, but neither his heart nor art is in it. He has gigs at a Chelsea gallery and as an art-restorer, but his own work seems to be going nowhere. His small-scale canvases feature scenes from European auteur cinema – Rohmer, Bergman – with the white characters replaced by Black figures. One friend tells him they’re “thought experiments, not paintings”. Another criticism he hears is that they’re “bourgeois, betraying a desire for black ease and affluence”.

Minor Black Figures is stacked with Wyeth’s thoughts about the state of Black art and aesthetics in the modern USA. Some are catty takedowns of what he calls “diasporic grifters”, opportunists who turn their “identity into a political glaze to be slathered all over their brand”. Some are specific: of Kehinde Wiley, whose portrait of Barack Obama hangs in the Smithsonian, he complains, “Yes, he painted beautiful people, but the nakedly commercial enterprise of it, the representational politics of ‘Black is beautiful’, was as arid and tedious as secular liberalism.”

Taylor is echoing Rachel Hunter Himes who, in a recent issue of Triple Canopy, argued that too many critics applaud the work of Black artists for being “urgent, relevant, and timely”, and that “understood as a shorthand for artistic meaning, blackness can short-circuit other potential or latent meanings”. Wyeth asks: “Could there ever be a painting of a black figure that was not reenacting some gross historical harm?” He believes, “Even the phrase negro figuration presupposed a constructed social identity that had to be wrenched open and climbed out of in order to get to a place of actual subjective experience.” The issues at play here are important, but the language in which they’re couched is often crabbed and inert, redolent of academic conferences and earnest art journals.

Just as enervating is Wyeth himself. “I’m exhausting and cynical,” is his belated self-diagnosis. He’s not wrong. When his observations about New York – it’s noisy! – aren’t hackneyed, they’re fastidious and finicky. He sees a girl holding a balloon and wonders, “What did it mean to her, this shape, this object? What was the source of her delight in it? The texture? The tension of the rubber?” It’s unclear whether Taylor is making fun of him or trying to reveal how artists look at the world. His use of free indirect speech adds to the uncertainty – lights are “uncannily egg-like”; a boy’s face has “a curious luminance”; in a park a character feels “a certain upward titration of his risk”: is such clumsy language meant to index Wyatt’s gaucheness, or does it reveal that of the author?

There are people in Wyeth’s orbit – waspish painters and video-makers with whom he shares a studio – who might have offset his stilted sententiousness. Too often they’re portrayed in slapdash fashion: one of them, we’re told, “like many gay men in their early thirties, always looked severe and angry, like he was contemplating voting against the end of slavery out of sheer spite”. Late evening, at a bar, Wyeth meets a former priest called Keating who is described as beautiful – “Not in some cheesy way, not in the Raphaelite sense that made a great beauty out of every twink and skinny white man”. Given his tendency toward ornery pomposity, I can’t imagine Wyeth saying or thinking this.

Wyeth and Keating’s relationship grows, falters, drifts. It’s tentative, almost as lethargic as summer. They talk – sometimes seriously, sometimes boringly. They have a bit of a hiatus after Wyeth asks Keating why, after he’s been hanging about with a group of homeless men and women, he washes his hands. Hot priests may be all the rage these days, but it’s hard for us to get worked up about their affair. Early on, in one of the many chunks of authorial didacticism that bung up Minor Black Figures, Wyeth wonders if it’s possible to “preserve the insignificance of the ordinary. Render it in its natural mode.” Perhaps it is. Not here, though.

Wil Haygood’s new book, his 10th, is The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home. Meeting in Washington DC to discuss it, he produces from between the pages a small Ziploc bag. Carefully, he takes out a flier, yellowed and brittle with age. The text at the top is Vietnamese. Underneath there is English.

It reads: “Colored GI’s! The South Vietnamese people, who are struggling for their independence and freedom, are friends with the American colored people being victim of barbarous racial discrimination at home. Your battlefield is right in the USA! Your enemy is the war lords in the White House and the Pentagon!”

Haygood says: “One of the soldiers I interviewed, Elbert Nelson, the doctor, he explains in the book that he found this leaflet directed to Black soldiers. And he was so touched that I tracked him down, he said, ‘I want you to have this.’ It was from the North Vietnamese, it was attached to trees and walls. It just gave me chills.”

The War Within a War tells such stories of Black Americans who from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s served in or otherwise experienced Vietnam: soldiers, marines, pilots, doctors and nurses, officers and drafted men, reporters and activists, cultural commentators and more.

Saying “this is my most important book,” Haygood cites a great writer who pointed the way.

“We need to remind Americans who have a very short memory what James Baldwin said. I met Baldwin when I started out my journalism career. I was at the Boston Globe, and he was a visiting writer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and I was sent up there to do a feature about him. This was 1985. I hadn’t written a single book, but I was dreaming. And now I have a quote from him at the start of my book. I’ll read it, if I may.”

In a steady voice, Haygood reads words first published in the Black journal Freedomways in 1967.

“Long before the Americans decided to liberate the south-east Asians, they decided to liberate me. My ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this for he … was the first Viet Cong victim. We were bombed first.”

Haygood “came across that quote early in writing, and I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to use that at the beginning of the book, because it says everything.’ It synthesizes so much of what the feelings were among so many of those soldiers.”

Haygood describes racism faced by Black soldiers, stark disadvantages in circumstances and outcomes washing back to American soil, a nation jaggedly divided.

“Vietnam was the first desegregated war,” Haygood says, “the first engagement on any large scale in the history of this nation where Blacks and whites had to depend on each other. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, in spirit, told us to do that, to respect your fellow man or woman. But so often, that didn’t happen.”

Figures from the Library of Congress are stark: “Approximately 300,000 African Americans served in the Vietnam war. In 1965, African Americans filled 31% of ground combat battalions in Vietnam, while the percentage of African Americans as a minority in the general population was 12% … African Americans saw combat at a higher percentage and suffered casualties at a higher rate. Dr Martin Luther King Jr referred to the Vietnam war as a white man’s war, a Black man’s fight.”

In his reporting days, Haygood went to war zones including Somalia and Liberia. Closer to home, a piece for the Washington Post about a veteran White House staffer inspired The Butler, a hit 2013 film starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, directed by Lee Daniels. Previous book subjects include congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr, supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.

His Vietnam book grew from humble roots. Haygood “grew up in Columbus, Ohio, lived on North 5th Street, and when I was in seventh grade, there was a guy who lived directly across the street by the name of Skip Dunn”.

“He was in high school, he was like the neighborhood sports hero, and he would wave to me every morning. ‘Hey, Wil.’ And then came a period when I didn’t see Skip. And I asked my sister, who was in school with him: ‘Where’s Skip?’ And my sister looked down at me and said: ‘Skip’s going to a place called Vietnam.’

“The following year, the summer of 1968, my mother moved to the east side of town, to an all-Black housing project. We were very poor. And that summer, there were rebellions and uprisings as a result of the assassination of King, and so I as a little kid found myself running from national guard troops and tanks that were sent to keep us all contained.”

King’s death was also a watershed event for Black Americans in Vietnam, where 1968 was also the year of the Tet offensive, the North Vietnamese onslaught that showed the war wouldn’t be won.

Nearly 60 years after that, the war has been exhaustively studied. Nonetheless, Haygood identified “a big gap when it comes to Black soldier experiences, because Americans are still pretty confused by that war, and it’s a scary war to talk about because it lasted so long … and so I started thinking of the guy who lived across the street, Skip Dunn.

“I went back home. Skip had passed away but I started talking to people, and there were five other people who went, five other Black guys, and I happened to have known all of them. And so I said: ‘It damn sure is a book, now that I can pivot off of my childhood experiences, and start traveling around the nation, finding these soldiers to talk about the war.’”

Dunn appears on Haygood’s cover, under a helmet, gazing out at the reader. Inside, boldface names include Joseph B Anderson, a West Point graduate and the subject of The Anderson Platoon, a 1967 Oscar-winning documentary directed by Frenchman Pierre Schoendoerffer. There is also George Forrest, who fought heroically at Ia Drang, a ferocious battle in 1965; Fred Cherry, an ace pilot shot down the same year, tortured, finally released in 1973; and Wallace Terry, a Post and Time reporter who wrote Bloods, an oral history published in 1984.

Haygood also considers Motown’s response to the war, Berry Gordy putting out spoken-word albums of speeches in opposition, Marvin Gaye recording his great album What’s Going On in part-tribute to his brother, Frankie, one of thousands of psychological casualties.

There is Dorothy Harris, a nurse who in Cu Chi in 1967 grew close to an infantry captain, Riley Leroy Pitts, then formed a supportive bond with his widow. There is the remarkable Philippa Schuyler, a mixed-race former child prodigy pianist who went to Vietnam to save orphaned children, but died on 9 May 1967 when her helicopter went down near Da Nang.

Schuyler, Haygood says, “could get away with hiding who she was with white soldiers. But the Black soldier said: ‘No, we know exactly who you are, and we know exactly what you’ve been running from. And baby, we need to bring you up to speed about what’s going on in the world, in America and in Vietnam.’”

Shifts in political consciousness dot the book, among Black soldiers “dapping” to express solidarity, in chaotic actions such as the lethal uprising at Long Binh Jail, where Black soldiers disproportionately dominated.

Schuyler, Haygood continues, “came to really admire those Black soldiers who wanted to give her tutorials in Black history and in history in general, in the truth of history. You can’t run from facts. I know we’re in an age where people do run from facts, but we shouldn’t.”

His words are weighted. As The War Within a War is published, the Trump administration continues its war on Black history, particularly in the military, taking away honors bestowed on Black soldiers. One features prominently in Haygood’s book.

In 1966, at a US base in Cam Ranh Bay, Art Gregg was a lieutenant colonel in logistics. By the time he retired in 1982, he was the first Black three-star general. He was in his 90s when, in the fraught summer of 2020, he discussed with Haygood the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the protests for racial justice that followed.

From 2021, under Joe Biden and former general Lloyd Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, the US military attempted to reckon with its racist past. In 2023, as part of a wider renaming initiative, Fort Lee in Virginia, named for a Confederate civil war general, was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams, honoring Gregg and Lt Col Charity Adams, the highest-ranking Black woman in US forces in the second world war.

“This shows the army has come a long way,” Gregg said then.

Gregg died in 2024, aged 96. In 2025, amid a slew of base renamings, the Trump administration took away Gregg and Adams’s honor.

To Haygood, “it’s unbelievable that a nation as big as ours, steeped in the history of slavery and in the savagery of Jim Crow, would come to a point when it would try to rewrite history.

“It was full proof to me, in light of what was happening to Black military history as the Trump administration was trying to wipe away all of these historical moments, that this would be my most timely book.

“This is the book the literary gods at this point in life wanted me to write, because I do firmly think that writers and film-makers will step up in this moment, amid this effort to whitewash history. As long as I have a pen in my hand, I will fight the good fight.”

Eric Huntley, who has died aged 96, was the co-founder with his wife, Jessica, of the radical publishing house Bogle L’Ouverture, set up in London in 1968 to showcase black writing talent. Initially run on a printing press in their west London living room, the venture soon outgrew those makeshift premises, and in 1975 became the Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop, which established itself as a community hub and informal advice centre as well as a place to buy books from outside the mainstream.

Among the authors championed by Bogle L’Ouverture were Linton Kwesi Johnson, Valerie Bloom, Lemn Sissay, Beryl Gilroy and Donald Hinds, while the Huntleys also became involved in creating the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books, which ran from 1982 to 1995, uniting and amplifying the thoughts of black intellectuals, creatives and activists across continents.

Aside from his work in publishing, Huntley was for many years involved in racial justice campaigns in the UK. He was a key figure in the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association and the Black Parents Movement; the first formed in response to the racist labelling of large numbers of black children as “educationally subnormal” and the second campaigning against “sus” laws that allowed police to stop, search, and arrest individuals on suspicion of intent to commit a crime – a facility that was deployed disproportionately against young black people in the 1970s and 80s.

He was also closely involved in the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981, which followed the dire police response to what was widely suspected to be a racist arson attack, the New Cross fire in south-east London in January 1981, when 13 young black people lost their lives (one survivor later killed himself, bringing the death toll to 14).

Born in Georgetown in British Guiana (now Guyana), Eric was one of the 12 children of Frank, a prison warder, and Selina, a housewife. A bright, attentive pupil, he attended Smith Memorial primary school in Georgetown, but was unable to go to high school because of family hardship. When his father was posted to Berbice, Eric worked for the local post office as a messenger, and also trained briefly as a Methodist preacher. But he soon gave up the cloth, much to the consternation of his devout father, and moved back to Georgetown, where he continued as a postal worker.

In 1948 he met Jessica Carroll, a trainee typist, and they married in 1950, moving to nearby Buxton, where Eric was a postman.

With tensions brewing between labour unions and the British authorities, the Huntleys linked up with the Marxist politicians Cheddi and Janet Jagan and their colleague Forbes Burnham to help form the People’s Progressive party in 1950, campaigning for independence.

The party’s victory at the ballot box in 1953 ended up with the British government declaring a state of emergency and suspending the colony’s constitution, claiming that a revolution was afoot. In 1954 Huntley was arrested for breaking a curfew, and spent a year in Georgetown prison, where his father was working at the time. He later reflected on the “mental torture” the situation inflicted on both of them.

Following his release in 1955, he was spurred by the unstable political climate to seek a better and safer life in Britain in 1957. This was a difficult decision to make; he had to leave behind Jessica and their two young sons, Karl and Chauncey. When he arrived in cold, foggy Southampton, the shortcomings of the wedding suit he had travelled in were soon apparent. He managed to secure work at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in London, and studied at night school while saving for the passage for Jessica and the boys. They joined him in 1962, and in London the couple went on to have a third child, Accabre.

Struggling to get housing in the capital, at one point the family lodged at the home of some Trinidadian friends, John and Irma La Rose. The La Rose household was a place alight with political discussions about the decolonisation movement. Huntley described it as a “university”, and while there he encountered the young Guyanese political activist Walter Rodney, who was pursuing postgraduate studies at Soas University of London.

Rodney made a deep impression on the Huntleys, and in 1968 they decided to set up Bogle L’Ouverture (named after two heroes of black resistance, Paul Bogle and Toussaint L’Ouverture) to distribute Rodney’s speeches in the UK. At the time La Rose’s New Beacon Books (formed in 1966) and Allison & Busby (1967) were the only other black-owned publishers in London.

Self-financed and run out of the Huntleys’ home in Ealing, the press published its first title, Rodney’s The Groundings With My Brothers, in 1969. Later they released Kwesi Johnson’s Dread Beat and Blood (1975), several books by Andrew Salkey, Gilroy’s Black Teacher (1976), and poetry collections by Bloom, Sissay, Sam Greenlee, Lucinda Roy, Imruh Bakari and John Lyons. The Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop opened in 1975, renamed the Walter Rodney bookshop following Rodney’s assassination in 1980.

Between 1977 and 1979, when support for the National Front was at its height, the shop was the target of numerous racist attacks. When windows were broken in the 11th such incident, Huntley, along with fellow black bookshop owners, picketed the Home Office, forcing the police to provide adequate security for their businesses and take the crimes seriously. Bogle L’Ouverture survived until 1991, with Huntley blaming its decline on rising rents and cuts to grants.

The business was never designed to turn a profit and, while Jessica focused full-time on running it, Eric worked as a part-time insurance salesman. After the shop closed they moved operations back to their house, where they continued to publish intermittently.

Eric’s advocacy of community causes went on well into his 10th decade, when he observed that “the struggle never ends: there is always something to fight for”. Papers relating to the Huntleys’ activism and publishing are now held at The Friends of the Huntley Archives at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Karl died in 2011, and Jessica in 2013, after which Eric created a community garden in Ealing in her honour. He is survived by Chauncey and Accabre, nine grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild.

The organiser of the Black British book festival, Selina Brown, announced earlier this month that the festival will launch a publishing collaboration with Pan Macmillan, focusing on “raw talent”, in particular writers who have not been traditionally published.

The publisher will commission adult and children’s books, set to hit shelves from 2027.

This year the BBBF saw a 50% decline in the volume of books pitched by publishers for the festival, a figure festival CEO Brown describes as indicative of a “definite issue in Black authors being acquired”. She compared the situation to 2022, when the BBBF received hundreds of book submissions after the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter movement.

“This year was completely different. Some publishers were even saying ‘We don’t have any books to give you’.” The problem is reflected in a recent Inclusive Books for Children survey, which found a sharp drop in the number of children’s books featuring a Black main character. This widespread decline in the publishing of Black literature motivated Brown to pitch the new publishing collaboration to Pan Macmillan.

Brown has seen publishing from all angles, from working at Birmingham Central Library to running marketing campaigns with publishers and writing her own books. She felt the publishing industry was slow to innovate.

“For me the missing gap has always been the people, the voice of the people. Shaping the way books are acquired, shaping the marketing, shaping the genres, because we know what we want to read and how we want to access the books,” Brown says. She wants “community” to be at the “core” of the new publisher. “That way we’re saying that you guys are experts in this and we need to learn from you, rather than having all the meetings in publishing houses with a lot of people not from our backgrounds.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Working with Pan Macmillan, the main sponsor for BBBF for the past four years, was an easy choice for Brown. “They’ve always championed our ideas. They’ve always been behind us, been an ally … They get us,” she says.

The new publisher is looking for stories that reflect the “height of Black British literature”, and can be read by everyone. “We want to bring the type of books that editors would water down to life because it’s about time, it’s 2025 now,” Brown says.

She nodded to other UK publishers who help to spotlight Black British voices. “We stand on the shoulders of great publishers that have come before us – HopeRoad, Jacaranda Books, Merky Books, Dialogue. Shoutout to Margaret Busby and Verna Wilkins because they laid the foundations.” The new publisher does not yet have a name.

The announcement came right before the festival’s headline event featuring actor Tabitha Brown. “It was a magical moment,” says Selina.

It is nighttime. There are black-and-white shots of blurry torches, dim outlines of crowds shuffling. Against these backdrops, the 2022 film I’ll Be Back! displays five intertitles, telling the story of François Makandal:

It’s 20th January 1758

fAnd a crowd is assembled in what’s known now at Cap-Haitien

The rebel slave, Francois Mackandal, is to be burned at the stake

Mackandal is condemned not only for his crimes

But for his radical powers of metamorphosis

Makandal was an enslaved Black man, burned alive at the stake by white supremacists. He was “a maroon for eighteen years,” explains Marlene L. Daut, a man who lived “eighteen years of fugitivity.” The reason? Makandal was accused by colonial officials “of having ‘corrupted’ and ‘seduced’ other enslaved individuals with ‘des paquets prétendus magiques,’ or ‘supposedly magical packets,’ which he sold with ‘malicious intent.’” “Dangerously free”—to use Toni Morrison’s phrase—Makandal as a legend is “the sign, symbol, and rhythm of rebellion in the Caribbean.” Through sound and image, I’ll Be Back! reimagines and reclaims Black global histories.

Most recently on exhibition at Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery, I’ll Be Back! (digital, 16mm) is only 10 minutes and 54 seconds. And yet, the film—made by Manchester-born Hope Pearl Strickland—exemplifies how archives and rebellion, history and geography, might bring forth a radical futurity that builds on what Katherine McKittrick calls “existing liberatory practices.” I’ll Be Back! was commissioned by FACT Liverpool with public funding from Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. The film weaves and unravels global Black histories on a triple axis: the enduring legend of an enslaved individual who rebelled for 18 years in 18th-century Haiti before being murdered by white supremacists; the machinery of what Stephanie E. Smallwood calls “saltwater slavery” that transformed stolen African people into commodities through the Middle Passage, emblematized by schematics of the 18th-century British slave ship Brookes; and colonial violence in the British-occupied 1890s Sierra Leone obscured from, yet constitutive of, contemporary natural history archives.

The things that preoccupy Strickland’s camera formally render the intimacies of Black global history. Indeed, in interviews, Strickland refers to how Makandal’s story inspires “liberatory futures around Blackness,” offering, for her, “a passageway through into something bright and alive.” And her own film, thankfully, opens that same way for us.

---

That “passageway” opens as far back as the Middle Passage, when Strickland’s film turns to the Brookes slave ship, built in Liverpool in 1780–81. This vessel forms the basis of “the slave ship icon,” according to art historian Cheryl Finley. In 1788, British abolitionists commissioned a schematic drawing showing the numbers and placement of trafficked Africans crammed into the ship’s hold, with no space to stand or even sit. At the time, the image quickly became widely reproduced and associated with the legal and political fights to end chattel slavery. But in the hands of Strickland, the ship now occasions the “ritualized politics of remembering” that is “a key cultural practice of artists of the African diaspora today.”

The film’s repossessing and remembering of the slave ship icon unfolds in Manchester’s Portico Library. Filmed from above, the title page is too faint to read, but the stamp of “PORTICO LIBRARY” at an angle marks the book’s current ownership. Two pairs of hands make several attempts to unfold the book’s fragile flyleaf. Taking care that the seams do not rip or crack, the hands together gently open up the page to the camera: the Brookes slave ship, its plans and sections. Voice-over narration explains what we see as we see it, the camera first mimicking the bird’s-eye view of the illustration’s perspective.

But then, Strickland’s camera begins offering extreme close ups of the figures of enslaved Africans. This focus renders each as individuals, and also as representative of millions of stolen people. As we follow the camera’s quiet, careful study, we observe, as Fred Moten reflects, that the slave ship also contains the means of its own undoing.

Strickland contrasts the unfolding of the slave ship icon—the undoing, remembering, and repossessing that it engenders—with other museum objects that have received curatorial care and attention. These are not archives of or for enslaved peoples, nor of or for their kith and kin, to evoke Ramesh Mallipeddi’s language; instead, Stickland showcases archives of insects. An accretion of shots of storage rooms, each empty of people but stuffed full of specimen boxes, questions the archive as a neutral space. And the historical entanglement of entomology and colonialism directly presents Strickland with the material to make that challenge explicit.

In two connected scenes, the film juxtaposes voice-over narration that perpetuates archival violence with images that teach, in Sylvia Wynter’s sense, the need for redescription.

In the first, an entomology curator matter-of-factly issues jarringly apologist statements: “during the colonial past of British Empire when people who were not necessarily involved in anything like slavery”; “nothing with slavery”; “they were doing their duty”; “officers who were sent to do their certain jobs.” As this voice intones its narrative of neutrality and the happy progress of science—purposefully forgetting the “scramble for Africa” by European nations, both violently named and violently executed—we watch unidentified 16-mm archival black-and-white footage of a white man in a white suit and hat, standing on the ocean’s shore.

The second voice-over narration again reproduces racial harm, but, again, the film simultaneously introduces the means to reclaim, repurpose, and reimagine the violence of the archive: research. Again, the curator’s voice-over obfuscates the collection’s colonialist genealogy: for instance, the collector “was basically a topographer making borders and collected insects”; “we have a nice historical record of what was going on in Sierra Leone in 1891 and in 1893.” Here, again, Strickland fills the screen with successive images of research, in the process teaching viewers:

a computer screen of a Google search for “Sierra Leone”;

a computer screen of a Wikipedia search for “Sierra Leone”;

a computer screen of a Britannica.com article, “Claims of territorial boundaries,” under the heading “West Africa”;

scrolling down the article;

highlighting this text in blue on the computer screen:

The political boundaries established by the Europeans by 1898 (though usually not surveyed or demarcated on the ground until much later) largely determine the political map of western Africa today.

a computer screen of the title page of a scholarly article

highlighting this text in blue on the computer screen:

The imperialists destroyed the Sierra Leone-Guinea system: beyond establishing the boundary, they interfered with the movement of traders and broke links between people and towns.

About a century earlier, abolitionists established Sierra Leone as a British colony for freed and repatriated enslaved Africans. In the 1780s, Olukunle P. Owolabi explains, the country was settled by “black loyalists from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, African American settlers, emancipated Afro-descendants from the British West Indies, and more than 80,000 liberated Africans that the British Royal Navy rescued from slave ships destined from the New World.”

But then, in the 1890s, British imperial and economic ambition cut Sierra Leone in two, dividing it into a colony and a protectorate. This is the period when one “Ellis Joynson Chalmer Leech” from Manchester traveled to Sierra Leone as a Second Lieutenant in the 1st West India Regiment and later worked as an Assistant Inspector of Frontier Police (“The Frontiers”) around Freetown. “The Frontiers” was one of several “lightly armed paramilitary forces” in Sierra Leone supported by the British government that drew trade borders, collected taxes, and policed political borders. Leech was one of numerous British men who gathered a “casual record of species encountered during an overseas military posting.” Thereafter, Leech’s collection was donated to—and still resides in—the archives of the Manchester Museum.

Strickland lets the curator featured in the voice-over talk at length. And yet, as much as he protests, the film reveals that the study of insects can’t be extricated from the study of colonialism and the legacies of saltwater slavery. Even the study of insects in 17th-century microscopy confirms these intimacies.

the film simultaneously introduces the means to reclaim, repurpose, and reimagine the violence of the archive: research.

A different insect is taken up by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga. The tsetse fly, for Mavhunga, demonstrates how intellectual appropriation and colonialization obscure the centrality of African scientific knowledge production to 20th-century epidemiology. As he does so, Mavhunga reflects, he also “seek[s] to reclaim my own humanity through an insect—seemingly innocuous, inconspicuous, grossly underestimated, and yet. …”

For Mavhunga as for Strickland, the study of insects can be a conduit to “reclaim my own humanity” and, as such, can animate “existing liberatory practices.” And this possibility is what leads to the film’s conclusion.

Against a dark sky lined with streams of comet-like bursts, intertitles read:

Legend has it

Right before his execution,

Mackandal transforms into a fly

Zooming above the scene of his execution

And crying out

‘I’LL BE BACK!’

Strickland’s I’ll Be Back! opens and closes with Makandal’s “radical powers of metamorphosis,” specifically the legend that circulated from the moment of his murder. Makandal, who evaded colonial control in life, now—it was said—evades colonial punishment in death, transforms into an insect, and slips away. In the process, Makandal, too, reclaims his humanity, inspiring “liberatory futures around Blackness.” Makandal’s promise to return—“I’ll Be Back!”—reverberates in the film’s final image, a cloudy, gray, daytime sky with a fly buzzing in the distance that shows us the way toward “a passageway through into something bright and alive.” 

Featured image of a still from I’ll Be Back via FACT Liverpool

BBC journalists cannot wear T-shirts in the newsroom supporting the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, the corporation’s director general has said.

Tim Davie said the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.

“You cannot have any assumption about where people are politically. You leave it at the door, and your religion is journalism in the BBC. And I tell you: the problem I’ve got is people react quite chemically to that.

“So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on. We stand absolutely firmly against racism in any form.

“I find some of the hatred in society at the moment utterly abhorrent, personally, really upsetting, but that is a campaign that has politicised objectives. Therefore, it is not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.

“And, for some people joining the BBC, that is a very difficult thing to accept. And it has not been an easy thing to get done this, and we wrestle with it every day.”

Speaking about diversity and impartiality at the BBC at the Cheltenham literature festival, Davie also drew a parallel with impartiality when reporting on mainstream political campaigning.

“I feel very, very strongly that if you walk into the BBC newsroom, you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election – no way, that’s not even acceptable,” he said.

The BBC director general also said his “number one priority” was “trying to navigate a course where you are impartial” and that required “elements of diversity”, adding that “socioeconomic diversity” was something that “hadn’t been talked about enough”.

He added: “It is absolutely a big battle, and I’m getting questions: ‘Why are you giving a voice to Reform?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We’re not giving a voice, we’re covering – covering what people are interested in, covering the reality of what people feel.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Davie was also asked whether he felt safe when he had been shouted at and people had come into his personal space.

He said: “It’s not for the faint-hearted; these jobs in public life now, I mean, they are really quite demanding. I’m no great Californian hippy, but you have to look after yourself, you really have to.”

On Sunday morning, the Barbican’s vast concrete foyer will swap its usual quiet for a buzz of conversation and excitement, and a particular kind of cultural energy: Black British storytelling in all its multiplicity.

Now in its fifth year, the Black British book festival (BBBF) has become Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature. What began as a small, intimate gathering has grown into a national institution attracting thousands of attendees and some of the biggest names in publishing.

Founded by Selina Brown in 2021, the festival grew out of the children’s author’s frustration at being told that her book wouldn’t sell because there was a Black girl on the cover. Determined to create a space she couldn’t find elsewhere, Brown launched the inaugural event as a one-day festival. Five years later, it has expanded into a year-round cultural platform, hosting three major festivals across the UK, opening libraries, collaborating with Glastonbury, and launching a children’s book festival headlined by Sir Lenny Henry.

“Black British literature has always been rich, but too often it hasn’t been given the platform or investment it deserves,” says Brown. “The festival exists to change that.”

The lineup for this year’s main event at the Barbican includes Denise Lewis, Marcus Ryder, Jordan Stephens and June Sarpong. The 36-event programme spans everything from political conversations to children’s storytelling, as well as panel discussions with leading Black authors and workshops for aspiring writers. There are talks on Malcolm X, sessions on getting published, and spaces where writers and readers can meet one another.

“It’s an absolute celebration of Black thinking,” says Ryder, a charity director and co-founder of the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, who will be at the festival to discuss his and Henry’s new book about reparations, The Big Payback. “We just don’t celebrate the joy of Black creativity enough.”

“The Black British experience is unique in that you’re constantly battling a perceived idea of what Britishness is and how we fit into it,” adds Stephens, best known for being one half of Rizzle Kicks, who is also hosting an event at the festival. “So when you’re around people who have all been in that battle, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is actually really nice. It’s a vibe.’ It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, an odd loop.”

But if the BBBF has flourished, the same can’t necessarily be said of the publishing landscape around it. The post-2020 boom sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement now looks like a spike rather than a shift.

The UK saw a 56% rise in the sales of books by writers of colour in the financial year to 2021. Titles such as Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, published in 2017, shot to the top of the UK nonfiction chart, making Eddo-Lodge the first Black British author to hold that position. Publishing houses raced to replicate the formula.

But the momentum didn’t last. Earlier this year, leading Black literary figures told the Guardian that UK publishing is now less accessible to Black authors than it was five years ago. Analysis by the Bookseller in 2023 found that the post-2020 boom “failed to result in the promised broadening of publishing’s output”. And just last week, a literacy charity reported a “catastrophic decline” in the number of children’s books featuring Black main characters, down by more than a fifth between 2023 and 2024.

“It can be soul-destroying to look at the ebbs and flows of a system that isn’t necessarily based on integrity and authenticity,” Stephens says. “It’s about what’s hot.”

For Ryder, the problem isn’t a mystery. “The publishing financial model is broken,” he says. “Everybody holds up Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, but the truth is that when it was published, it just fell off and died, until the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. We clearly have a model that does not favour what is now acknowledged as brilliant, Black literature.”

“Two seemingly conflicting things are happening at the same time,” he adds. “The festival is growing really rapidly. And at the same time, lots of Black literature seems to be contracting. What that tells me is that there is a desperate need and a massive desire for community among people who enjoy Black literature. And what we need to do is build on that community.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

He isn’t talking about the quality of the work, but the structure of an industry that still treats it as niche. “If we believe that literature is a cornerstone of our democracy – which it is, because it’s putting out thinking and disseminating it across society – then we need to think about whether there needs to be state funding in it for underrepresented groups,” he says. “Literature is so important to society, and relying on just the profit motive to ensure its success is not the way forward.”

For Ryder, this is what makes the BBBF essential: it exists outside that model, and doesn’t wait for publishing houses to decide that Black writing is marketable. “Far too often we are responding to other people’s agendas,” he says. “Whereas what’s fantastic about this festival is that it is the agenda being set by Black people. It is the narratives being set by Black people. And you so rarely get spaces and opportunities to see that.”

In a moment of rising political tension and cultural division in the UK, the festival has an even sharper resonance. This summer saw racist riots and far-right marches erupt in towns and cities across England. Reform UK has surged in the polls and St George’s flags have been painted across pavements. A new cultural consensus – anti-DEI, anti-migrant, “anti-woke” – is being loudly asserted in public spaces.

While Ryder admits that the festival offers a counterweight to this hostile political climate, he is resistant to framing it as such: “I don’t want our actions to be dictated as merely the response to white people’s concerns and white people’s interests. What I want is for us to be setting an agenda for what we need as Black people.”

“This energy has been in Britain my whole life – my dad grew up with the National Front, the BNP, getting battered in the street,” Stephens adds. “This is the imperialist nature of Britain. So right now, with all of that going on, it is nice to remind ourselves that Black people are doing dope shit.”

Stephens is clear-eyed about the limitations of representation in the UK, though. “Everything Black is just shoved into October and then people move on,” he says. That October effect – the surge in interest during Black History Month followed by silence – is something many writers know too well.

With that in mind, the BBBF can serve as an assertion of cultural permanence, when Blackness can sometimes be treated as fleeting or conditional. And the sense of community-building, Ryder notes, echoes cultural renaissances past. “There’s an untapped desire for a Black British community of creatives and thinkers,” he says. “If we look back in history – the Harlem Renaissance – those writers weren’t working in isolation. They were coming together, forming community. Once you have that community, other things will flow from it. Literature will flow from it, great thinking flows from it, great art flows from it.”