Adrian Fernandes

Five years after the Black Lives Matter movement reignited powerful student demands to diversify the English literature curriculum, Writers Make Worlds reviews where we stand now. Our initiative, which rose from diversification interests emerging in the 2010s, reported on the Oxford protests as they happened. The conclusion is clear: the vibrant, student-led energy that pushed for a literature syllabus reflecting students’ lives has collided with institutional rigidity. The promise of 2020 has faded, stifled by deeply embedded barriers.

In 2020, the demand for change was unignorable. Students and young people, with London organisers as young as 18 and 21, orchestrated the largest antiracist uprising in decades. Their emails to headteachers offered detailed critiques, linking the white literary canon to colonial history and systemic racism. For a moment, transformative change seemed an exciting possibility.

Today, that momentum has been absorbed. Recent research with English teachers reveals that, whilst examination boards expanded reading lists, the crucial architecture for implementation was not built. Teachers report a vacuum of training and material resources, forcing a return to (in one participant’s words) a “tried and tested” canon. The white canonical texts by Dickens, Priestley and Stevenson are in the book cupboard, and their familiar schemes of work offer a safe bet in a system that prizes examination grades.

The entire burden of enacting curriculum change was placed upon individual teachers, who simultaneously navigated institutional hostility. Some faced performative allyship – schools that, as one participant said, “chatted a lot but acted little.” Others encountered direct retaliation for their efforts to create change. One teacher, who found a lack of representation after a curriculum audit, was directly threatened by their manager with the words, “If you show this to anyone, I will see you fired.” Where support for addressing change did occur, minoritised teachers were often saddled with unpaid diversity labour, automatically positioned as “the race expert” against their will.

Back in 2020, the profound student engagement with representative texts was neatly reflected in one participant’s joyful remark on reading a minoritised text: “This story feels like my family!” Now, the government’s recent curriculum review offers a new chance to make that feeling of belonging systemic. For this moment to yield a different result, the response must be defined by what was absent before: the concrete investment, dedicated training and institutional courage required to enact lasting change. Without a commitment to implement these core supports, the review – and the diverse, representative curriculum it could enable – risks becoming just another fading echo.

Further reading

Elliott, V., Nelson-Addy, L., Chantiluke, R., & Courtney, M. (2021). Lit in Colour: Diversity in literature in English schools. Lit in Colour. https://litincolour.penguin.co.uk/

Elliott, V., Watkis, D., Hart, B., & Davison, K. (2024). The effect of studying a text by an author of colour: The Lit in Colour Pioneers Pilot. Lit in Colour. https://wp.penguin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Lit-in-Colour-Pioneers-Pilot-Report-Full-Final-V12.pdf

Peters, M. A. (2015). Why is My Curriculum White? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(7), 641–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1037227

Shukla, N. (2017, October 25). Adichie, Kureishi, Hurston: what authors should be in the ‘decolonised’ canon? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2017/oct/25/adichie-kureishihurston-what-authors-should-be-in-the-decolonised-canon

Cite this: Fernandes, Adrian. “Five years on from Black Lives Matter: The fading echo of curriculum change.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2025, https://writersmakeworlds.com/five-years-on-from-black-lives-matter-the-fading-echo-of-curriculum-change. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Zana Mody

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998 (5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025) is currently on display at the Barbican Centre in London. The dates in the exhibition’s title mark a turbulent period in India’s history. 1975 was the year in which Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the state of Emergency, imposed a draconian regime on the country during which almost all democratic rights were suspended. Some twenty years later, in 1998, India began its Pokhran nuclear testing program – a pivotal moment in its contemporary history which launched the country onto the geopolitical global stage. Exhibited in London, some 77 years after Britain’s violent exit from the subcontinent, this landmark exhibition pivots us back to a critical period of transformation in postcolonial Indian history. The exhibition features over thirty Indian artists whose works encapsulate the political turbulence of the subcontinent in the later twentieth century. This was a time when life in India was marked by ‘social upheaval, economic instability, and rapid urbanization’, as the introductory essay in the exhibition guide tells us.

The title of the exhibition takes its name from Indian cultural historian Sudipta Kaviraj’s critical essay, The Imaginary Institution of India, published in 1991. In it, he details the complexities of conceptualising the myth that is India as a nation. It is a myth that many Indian writers at home and abroad continue to wrestle with to this day, not least Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, among many others. From a postcolonial standpoint, Kaviraj’s essay speaks to the difficulty of enforcing and maintaining a historical sense of the nation in a modern society that is characterised by wide-ranging diversity and plurality.

Spread across the upper and lower galleries of the Barbican’s exhibition space, the show opens with a striking painting by the artist and writer Gieve Patel entitled Two Men with Hand Cart (1979). The pink composition provides a hazy backdrop to the two central figures in the painting who converse alongside the tools and objects of their trade. The quotidian scene offers a snapshot of the metropolis of city where traders and skyscrapers co-exist. This is a metropolis under construction, gesturing to the beginning of a globalised India, while the warm pink tones cast a hazy portrait, gesturing to the stylised artistic practises of nationalist myth-making within the microcosmic space of the city. In the background, the sepia-toned buildings – partially outlined and unfinished – allude to the city that is yet to be constructed. Patel’s painting offers us a scene in which he (and we) can speculate about India’s future. By placing two labourers at the centre of this scene, he alerts us to the impacts of the country’s economic developments on its inhabitants.

The visceral shock of the Emergency between the years of 1975–1977 is explored by artist Navjot Altaf whose ink prints transformed into political posters and framed the resistance struggle. Inspired by the visual language of Cuban political propaganda, Altaf’s artworks are powerful talismans of a period of serious social and economic upheaval. Amid glossy layers of black ink, a fist emerges in the dark as a symbol of unity and resistance.

A personal standout in the exhibition was a series of photographs taken by Sheba Chhachhi. Her 1980–91 series, Seven Lives and a Dream, is the culmination of a decade spent documenting the lives of various female activists during ‘The Woman’s Movement’ in India of the 1980s, in what she refers to as ‘staged portraits’. Chhachhi points out in a 2016 essay that these photographs mark a transition in her artistic career. As she begins to consider the photograph as ‘fiction rather than as document’, we see how these staged and collaborative portraits invite us into the inner lives of these female activists.[1] Pictured below is a striking portrait of the young historian Urvashi Butalia in Delhi in 1990, around the time she was compiling material for what would go on to become a major artefact in the 1947 Partition Archive: The Other Side of Silence. The book is the product of a decade of recording and transcribing female experience of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. During this period, thousands of women were brutalised and mutilated in the name of religious and sectarian differences. If 1947 marks the year in which the ‘fault lines of our nation state were becoming visible’, to use Butalia’s own words, then 1997, the time of publishing, reveals to us that the faultlines are now ‘full-blown and growing’.[2] Surrounded by documents, data, and testimonies, Butalia in the photograph stares directly at the camera, calling us to interrogate the other side of the 1947 Partition of India and its horrific impact on female bodies.

The artworks in the exhibition augment our sense of postcolonial Indian culture and its many facets, tracing a progression of the nation state over two decades through the imagination of artists both at home and elsewhere. For a contemporary Indian art exhibition of this scale to be exhibited in the heart of the city of London exposes, to an international audience, the rapid transformation of the Indian landscape between 1975 and 1998. It urges both British and global audiences to consider where the country stands today.

[1] Sheba Chhachhi, Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (2016).

[2] Urvashi Butalia, ‘Return’ in The Other Side of Silence, 2^nd edition (Haryana: Penguin Books, 2017).

Cite this: Mody, Zana. “The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998: Exhibition Report.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/the-imaginary-institution-of-india-exhibition-report/. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Eliza McCarthy

The British Library’s 2024 exhibition, Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music (26 April to 26 August) mapped the coordinates of a vast and ever-evolving audible history over a clockwise journey through the exhibition space. Three hundred exhibits explore the radical potential of Black British music to draw communities together and included pieces ranging from the letters of writer and composer Ignatius Sancho to Trinidadian steel drums, carnival costumes, sound systems and original installation pieces.

Images from the Beyond the Bassline exhibition, 2024 (Photos: Eliza McCarthy)

The exhibition culminated in iwoyi, an immersive five-channel piece commissioned by the British Library and created by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde in collaboration with Touching Bass. Rapoport is a London-based producer, artist, and film director, and Ayinde an artist and poet whose work traverses literary, audio, and video forms in its embrace of performance and installation. The South London Touching Base is a curatorial music and movement platform. Played at varying speeds across the walls and ceilings of two conjoined rooms, the piece offered an Afro-surrealist expressive journey into how sound and silence are entangled within Black life. We were invited to sit awhile on the benches or the cushions on the floor, and lean into the sensory opacity as sound lagged behind movement, and movement became fractured across the surfaces of the two conjoined rooms.

Rohan Ayinde & Tayo Rapoport’s Iwoyi, 2024 (Embed from Nowness)

Iwoyi strikes at the heart of the exhibition’s exploration into sound as a multisensory experience—a notion that was encapsulated by the poet Linton Kwesi Johnston’s 1980 album, Bass Culture that in many ways inspired the exhibition. The vinyl sleeve sits in a softly-lit glass in the middle of the displays and Johnson himself is famed for his experiments with audio frequencies below 40Hz, existing right on the boundaries of the human auditory realm. At this level, sound becomes tactile, radically unintelligible perhaps but felt as a physical sensation within the listener’s body. In Bass Culture, we are invited to consider sound beyond the realm of the aural, a notion that is played out on a larger scale in iwoyi.

At the heart of these two examples is the distinct ways in which sound is rendered at once highly material, tactile, and visible, contradicting its otherwise fundamental ephemerality. Whilst sound is translated into a physical sensation in Bass Culture, the aural similarly becomes entwined with the other senses in iwoyi. In the curatorial space that is mapped within Beyond the Bassline, sound continued to evolve. As we looked through the glass case at LKJ’s vinyl sleeve, we heard Fela Kuti meeting Shirley Bassey, and encountered the tinny sounds from headphones we had yet to use. And these sounds in turn crossed with the continual, surrounding-thrum of an ambient ocean scape in the contemporary short film, Of Us, about migrant identities in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay.

Bass Culture offered visitors a sound palimpsest that became continually re-contextualised within an ever-expanding soundscape and invited the possibility of a reparative future shaped within and around music.

Cite this: McCarthy, Eliza. “Exhibition Report – Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/exhibition-report-beyond-the-bassline-500-years-of-black-british-music/. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Clara Park

On 23 May 2024, the poet, writer and performer Roger Robinson gave a reading and talk at Oxford University’s St Hilda’s College entitled, “As if their bodies became AIR.” Robinson’s talk and the subsequent Q&A were moderated by Dr Malachi McIntosh, the Barbara Pym tutorial fellow at the College, a writer and critic, and a self-professed personal fan of Robinson’s writing.

Throughout, Robinson’s charismatic levity shone through as he flitted across the room, butterfly-like, working the crowd and reading a selection of poems from A Portable Paradise, his most recent collection, published in 2019 and the winner of the T. S. Eliot prize. His reading included “The Job of Paradise,” “Midwinter,” “The Crow Palinode,” “Grace” and “Day Moon.” Though these poems were all from the most recent collection, Robinson referenced earlier publications as well, including symbolic resonances from his 2013 The Butterfly Hotel. He also explained some of the backstory of his multimedia project with photographer and WMW author Johny Pitts, Home is Not a Place. 

Although Robinson’s work has often intervened in, and is distinctly entangled with, political issues, he insists that the craft of poetry is often politicised outside the control, or even intention, of the author. The poems in his A Portable Paradise ranged across a variety of themes, but, as he explained, were especially focused on thinking through the possibilities, impossibilities and practicalities of creating paradise in a new place. This is in contrast to The Butterfly Hotel, which emphasises the tearing in two that comes with immigration and migration. His ideas about migration from his earlier collections had transformed with the birth of his son, he said. He spoke about the subsequent necessity of putting down roots in a place that had consistently devalued “global majority bodies,” as he put it, and was hostile to the project of paradise-making for those denied dignity and body-hood. 

In the conversation, Robinson referenced both the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire and the Windrush scandal, to highlight the way in which bodies had become undone in these places that were not home. At Malachi McIntosh’s prompting, Robinson also discussed the ways that poetry might offer dignity and subjecthood to these political and politicised people through the (ironically) distinctly de-material and “air-borne” nature of poetry. As Malachi asked more about how that project and craft have changed over the years, Robinson characterised his movement from The Butterfly Hotel to A Portable Paradise as a continual effort to make a home in poetry. For Robinson, the making of poetry has been a project that intervenes in the world around him to create portable paradises. 

Robinson came back to the motif of a butterfly several times. Butterflies as images and motifs proliferate across Robinson’s new collection and also carry resonances with the work that Robinson cites as his creative and craft inspirations, not least the recurring flower motif in Louise Gluck’s collection The Wild Iris. The butterfly was also an apt metaphor to encapsulate his thoughts and presence at this event. Robinson’s poetic interests seem to be butterfly-like in their vast range and breadth (he reads widely, broadly, voraciously). His poetic practice is also committed to reconciling one identity across migrations, like a butterfly. He insists on beauty in the banal, and on the banal in the lives of people whose stories have been “under-told”, whose banalities haven’t been represented. The butterfly, for me, highlighted the wide range of poetic craft that Robinson studies, as well as forms of repeated and unrelenting migration. Ultimately, the motif underlines his dedication to using poetry to “create paradise,” to make “paradise portable,” to put down roots despite his previous expressions of rootlessness. 

Cite this: Park, Clara. “‘As if their bodies became AIR’: Roger Robinson in Oxford, 23 May 2024.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/as-if-their-bodies-became-air-roger-robinson-in-oxford/. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Jennifer Wong

Cited in the preface to the State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation anthology (Outspoken Press, 2023), leading British-Jamaican critic-scholar Stuart Hall suggested that cultural identity is ‘a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. This idea is pervasive across Writers Make Worlds, but in these days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora, it also relates specifically to diasporic Asian identity which is open-ended and subject to change. Indeed, looking only at Britain today, ‘it is impossible to fully encompass the complexities of Asian identities.’^[1]

Instead, the conversations in the book open up spaces to initiate exchanges among poets who identify as Asians, to encourage ‘accepting the complexity and diversity’ and appreciate ‘what they care about, write about, struggle with, or call out against.’ For example, in the conversation between Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade (2015) and Monica Youn, author of from from (2023), the task of writing about race and racialised experiences is addressed with searing honesty, and ranges from the complexity of the lyrical self to the writing of dailiness and motherhood.

Conversations in the book are generated from a diasporic community of Asian poets, as they corresponded with each other across continents and generations, sharing their thoughts on many levels: from languages, the meaning of home, gender and racial identities, to the craft of writing and their everyday life. Not only did the anthology lead to more visibility for the work of these Asian poets in Britain, it has also brought their works into dialogue thematically, highlighting the relationship between the works of minority writers and the ‘mainstream’ British literary canon. Moreover, the anthology makes space for discussing taboos and challenges these Asian poets face collectively. As US-based Chinese-Scottish poet and author of Imperium, Jay Gao, puts it in the book: ‘We’re allowed gratitude, glee, pride, cheer, joy—all tempered, or marbled, by some degree of modesty. What gets discussed far less, at least in public, is the private discomfort and alienation.’

On 28 November 2023, Professor Elleke Boehmer moderated a special reading and launch conversation in Oxford with some of the State of Play contributors including Sarah Howe, London-based Vietnamese-Chinese poet Natalie Linh Bolderston, joined by Asian-American poets Chen Chen and Lora Supandi. The poets reflected together on shared themes, including their complex, sometimes contradictory sense of belonging and racial heritage, their connections with the languages they grew up with, and the themes they feel compelled to write.

Amplifying the conversation further, to mark the LGBQT+ history month in February 2024, the English Faculty at the University of Oxford added a digital companion to the anthology, featuring short interviews and excerpts of conversations from the book with the anthology LGBQT+ contributors. As they noted, their sense of belonging in Britain is complex, because in addition to their racial and cultural belonging, their LGBQT+ identities also matter deeply. Therefore, the process of writing for the anthology prompted several of the poets to rethink their artistic work and the intersectional spaces in their writing, and how their work contributes to or finds a home in the contemporary literary scene. In particular, we see how individual Asian poets have always been readers themselves, and form part of the literary discourse, such as Kit Fan whose literary influences include Bishop, Wilde and Highsmith.

Born and raised in the Philippines before moving with his family to the UK in 2007, Troy Cabida noted in his contribution that we need to acknowledge the challenge that exists in writing about desire. On a personal level, the dynamics of sharing his writing and life journey in the anthology has also led him to reconsider the importance of being Asian and queer as formative experiences. At the same time, the experience of belonging to a writing community such as the one gathered between the covers of State of Play, has been helpful to him in becoming bolder and more playful in his expressiveness as a poet.

A Nepalese writer who studied English at Oxford, Mukahang Limbu published his first pamphlet, Mother of Flip-flops (2022) at the age of 20. For Mukahang, his creative practice involves finding space within and beyond migration: ‘for all the different facets that are not so separate; my mother, my father, being a migrant, boyhood, growing up, superstitions, softbois, and being gay can all fit in one poem.’

In a number of Asian countries or city-states such as Hong Kong, China and Singapore, the attitude towards LGBQT community is still conservative and queerness is regarded as subversive, morally dubious or controversial. Against this background, one can more fully appreciate the boundary-pushing nature of the works by these minority writers and the impact of migration on their creative work. As Marylyn Tan, Singapore-based poet and the first-ever female winner of Singapore Literature Prize, remarked, the anthology contribution has led to a new ‘space for re-discovering the community in an intimate and informal fashion’. She also notes how much she enjoys ‘the simple and mere fact of epistolary.’

As from the conversation between Asian-American poet Yanyi, author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World, 2022) and The Year of the Blue Water (2019) and the UK-based Hong Kong-Chinese poet Mary Jean Chan, author of Bright Fear (2023) and Flèche (2019), writing is a way of embracing the unknown, hidden parts of oneself. Yanyi concedes that ‘each one is the new poem you wanted to write that you didn’t know how to write.’ For Chan, having their book gifted or included in libraries or someone’s book collection is a way of feeling or being seen, and this sense of belonging is especially precious because, as a queer writer, they grew up in a society with far fewer models for their queer poetics.

In the dialogue between Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and Lora Supandi, Stanford graduate of Indonesian heritage, one becomes aware of how many painstaking struggles and epiphanies emerge from excavating meaning within different forms of relationships, including familial relationships, friendships and romantic love. In Chen Chen’s letter, he wrote: ‘Ache knows how to find us. Maybe because ache is life, too, alongside non-ache. They are neighbours.‘ In writing about pain, therefore, these writers also discover and acknowledge the necessity to celebrate or chronicle joy that exists alongside grief, and how those feelings will shape them as writers of colour.

^[1] Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong, Editors’ Preface in State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023), piii-iv.

Cite this: Wong, Jennifer. “Rethinking cultural identity and belonging: East and Southeast Asian Poets writing in and beyond Britain.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-wong-state-of-play. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Ciaran Duncan

In a city not short on spaces that can feel intimidating, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is especially prominent. Here is where Oxford’s students file in for their Graduation ceremonies. Where we talk about cultural gatekeepers, the Sheldonian is an especially well-established one–designed by the architect Christopher Wren to resemble a Roman theatre, with a (rather good) Siegfried Sassoon poem set in and named after it. What a pleasure, then, to see this space filled not by a parade of gowns competing for attention with the imposing baroque painted ceiling, but by the 2019 Booker Prize-winner, and longstanding Writers Make Worlds author, Bernardine Evaristo.

Evaristo is a writer and academic in possession of sharp intellect and passionate clarity of communication and this was in clear evidence in her 22 June Friends of the Bodleian talk, entitled “Bridging the Gap”. In it, she offered a virtuosic tour of postwar Black British literary history before zooming in on the literary landscape of 2023. Her through-line was the contribution of black female authors and their extra struggle to be heard and promoted, something she has directly experienced as well as studied.

Indeed, Evaristo’s talk was studded with personal testimony. She recalled how a top UK agent told her that her novel Mr Loverman (2013) was “too niche” (read: “black and queer”) to find success. This anecdote left me nearly tearing my hair out since that novel means a lot to me for the way it avoids the pattern of many successful queer novels which depict coming-of-age stories heavily focused on trauma and often lacking in any trace of humour. Evaristo is always keen to twist agilely away from stereotyping. For instance, she says she is often told in interviews that her most celebrated book Girl, Woman, Other (2019) is “a novel about race”. Why not consider it a novel “about” relationships or generational divides instead or as well? she asked.

In Evaristo’s account of modern Black British literary history, especial and due prominence was given to Buchi Emecheta, the trailblazing author whose life straddled Nigeria and Britain. Back in the 1970s and 80s, Emecheta’s work afforded Evaristo her introduction to books about black women’s lives. Of particular importance to her were Emecheta’s second novel Second Class Citizen (1974) and, above all, her later work The Joys of Motherhood (1979). That latter novel offers an indelible portrayal of an Igbo woman’s experience of working-class colonial Nigeria. Evaristo makes the case for this as an equally ground-breaking “female counterpart” to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), an unforgettable novel, now a classic, and, perhaps more than any other, a staple of postcolonial literature courses and reading lists everywhere. Evaristo drew her audience’s attention to the fact that so often the books taken as representatives of a period or movement are those authored by men. For instance, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is often talked about as “the” novel of the Windrush generation (and rather less discussed for its limited portrayal of female characters). Evaristo is not one to let any form of marginalisation go ignored and unexplored.

After discussing the intervening contributions of the likes of Andrea Levy and Judith Bryan, Evaristo homed in on the “lovely flourishing” of books by Black women that has occurred in Britain over the last few years. Here she highlighted in detail four novels published in 2023 that she has enjoyed; Writers Make Worlds author Diana Evans’ fourth novel, A House for Alice, the sequel to her award-winning Ordinary People, and set in the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy; Jacqueline Crooks’ debut, Fire Rush, which explores the relationships between young black Brits amidst the 1970s dub reggae scene, and has already been shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction; The List by Yomi Adegoke, which ambivalently explores the impact of social media allegations in the age of MeToo, and which Evaristo commended for its “entertaining versatility” of voices; and, finally, the founder of the pioneering gal-dem magazine Liv Little’s Rosewater, which for Evaristo marks “a generational first” in its “sexy and bodacious” portrayal of a young queer black woman in London. Noticeably, in the case of The List and Rosewater, she picks out qualities redolent of her own many-voiced mosaic of a novel Girl, Woman, Other. In Evaristo’s own words, GWO’s 2019 Booker Prize win has catapulted her from “Bernardine who?!” to “Bernardine, we’re so honoured to meet you!”. As well as rocket-fuelling her sales, the win gave her the platform that she used so judiciously in her talk to both recognise the women who have come before her, and spotlight her younger contemporaries who are helping to make this such an exciting time to be a reader.

In the post-lecture Q&A especially, Evaristo was sharp-eyed on the institutional underpinnings–the publishing industry, libraries, schools–that heavily influence who is read, studied and canonised. She described London’s Woolwich library as “the making of me” as a child. She referred to the Runnymede Trust’s 2021 report, Lit In Colour, which found that, at that time, fewer than 1% of students at GCSE studied a book by a writer of colour. Essentially, it is still possible to go through the entire UK education system being given only books by white writers. Finally, Evaristo discussed the Black Britain Writing Back series–“a huge passion project of mine”–that she has curated with Penguin and that has reissued landmark works by the likes of Beryl Gilroy and C.L.R. James.

Generous with enthusiasm and intellect, the overriding impression her talk left is one of life lived as a major passion project and a relationship to other people and language that is playful, curious and always open to new possibilities. Whether you look to novels for beauty or learning, community or self-interrogation, listening to Evaristo can only foster a sense of excitement at the further “lovely flourishing” to come if readers and writers manage to sustain the momentum behind Black British women’s writing. 

Cite this: Duncan, Ciaran. “Sustaining the Momentum: Bernardine Evaristo speaks at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, 22 June 2023.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2023, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-evaristo-bridging-the-gap-sheldonian. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Ciaran Duncan

“The tireless stoker, the poker shark, the elegant wanderer, the love-starved husband, the soft-hearted father” – Mahmood Hussein Mattan.

If Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel Black Mamba Boy (based on her father’s own story) explored the web of wanderings that led a Somali boy to become a British subject, such a transition forms only the backstory of her third publication: The Fortune Men. The novel’s main protagonist, Mahmood Hussein Mattan, is a sailor from colonised British Somaliland who has settled down in post-WWII Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, grounded by his love of a Welsh woman, Laura, and their young family. The novel excavates a true story of historical injustice as Mahmood is forced to fight for his life after he is suspected of murdering Jewish shopkeeper Violet Volacki. This is an act that he, despite being involved in several minor thefts, would never commit. In close third-person narration the novel follows both Mahmood, and especially in its first half, Diana Volacki, Violet’s sister. Diana has lived a fascinating life herself, notably becoming a Corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during WWII. This split focus shows Mohamed’s project to be the three-dimensional recreation of lives beset by different kinds of violence.

Mohamed writes the texture of place with virtuosic fluency, and Tiger Bay’s multiracial community forms her novel’s heart. By contrast to what Mahmood perceives as the “war-beaten and monochrome misery” of the Cardiff city centre, the dockside area teems with life. This is glimpsed, for instance, in the excitement of children of all creeds and colours during a lively Eid procession through the streets. Add a fun reference to an unknown Shirley Bassey singing in a local café and it grows clear why, on top of its 2021 Booker Prize shortlisting, the novel made a deserving winner of the 2022 Wales Book of the Year Award. Crucially though, the here-and-now of Tiger Bay is layered with all the remembered places Mohamed’s characters carry with them. Mohamed is drawn to immigrant communities’ “struggles to keep old worlds alive” in customs and in memory, whether Somali, West Indian, or Jewish.

Their shared new world is prominently tarnished by different forms of racism, though. The Jewish Volackis, for instance, are treated as a “model minority” by some in Cardiff but also subjected to a pernicious cluster of stereotypes and phobias all their own. Their shop has been vandalised several times before the ultimate violence of Violet’s murder. The leading questions and racial profiling that Mahmood will increasingly face do not occur in a vacuum.

The novel’s first words are “the King is dead. Long live the Queen”. 1952 saw George VI’s death and Elizabeth II’s accession: a moment of national and imperial transition highly resonant in 2023. Mohamed is more interested in the internal workings of the British State than its figurehead, however. The text’s final act begins with a trial scene in which Mohamed’s detailed evocation of internal and external worlds is replaced by a staccato court transcript. The reader feels Mahmood’s piercing disorientation and sense that events are rapidly spinning out of control. With tragic irony, a man who has seen vast swathes of the world and speaks five languages well is written off as an illiterate, “semi-civilized savage”. But Mohamed’s combination of archival research and creative imagining works against such misrecognition. Like Steve McQueen’s Small Axe television series, The Fortune Men places Britain’s contemporary reckoning with prejudicial policing and a biased legal system in its lengthy historical context. That Mohamed manages to present victims of injustice as complex, vividly human agents in their own right signals that one of Britain’s outstanding novelists has produced her fullest work yet.

Cite this: Duncan, Ciaran. ““Famous British Justice” on trial in Tiger Bay: A review of The Fortune Men.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2023, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-mohamed-the-fortune-men/. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Ann Ang

19 May 2022 – an appreciative audience was treated to a lively reading from poets Theophilus Kwek and Mary Jean Chan, followed by a discussion of their perspectives on writing with Niall Munro, Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre.

When introducing her poem “(Auto)biography,” Chan remarked how many assume that women’s writing would be “diary-istic” and “direct.” Her debut full-length collection, Flèche (Faber & Faber 2019) challenges such attitudes by inhabiting her mother’s voice and disapproval of her queerness. This poem, among others, fictionalises her mother’s life alongside Chan’s own. Describing her collection as an attempt to bring “queer shame and queer joy into the same space,” Chan also views Flèche as “a complex love letter to her mother” who was Shanghainese and faced both linguistic and cultural difficulties on her arrival in Chan’s birth city of Hong Kong. Now based in Oxford, many of Chan’s poems also relate to the body as both intimate space and weapon; flesh and flèche, in its negotiation of racial and gender boundaries. Flèche refers to an offensive move in the sport of fencing, which the poet practised when she was younger. Chan’s collection won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2019.

Besides being the author of four poetry collections, Kwek is also an editor and translator. His pamphlet, The First Five Storms (Smith|Doorstop, 2017), was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and won the inaugural New Poets’ Prize. Reading from his latest collection Moving House (Carcanet 2020), Kwek impressed listeners with his candour and the deft, meditative rhythms of his writing. The title poem arose from the sense of loss and dissonance he experienced when his parents relocated the family home without his knowledge. Much of Kwek’s verse refracts a charged sense of leave-taking and ethical reckoning. “Lucky” recounts a fatal road accident in Singapore involving Filipina domestic workers, who have few public spaces to meet on their rest-days. Similar feelings pervade his time in Oxford, as with “24.6.16”, which was prompted by the return of the red kite to the English countryside after being hunted to near-extinction. When asked about the question of appropriation in poetry, as distinguished from fiction, Kwek responds by saying that “family is where ‘welcome’ is despite moving house”, and that verse weaves a collective story when “we all look at the elements that we reflect in each other.” For Kwek, a poem moves beyond appropriation “to bear a gift without staking a claim on the story.”

Cite this: Ang, Ann. “On Family and Flèche: Theophilus Kwek and Mary Jean Chan Read at Kellogg College.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2022, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-kwek-chan-reading. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Eileen Ying

Tice Cin and Caleb Azumah Nelson arrived for a reading at Oxford’s Daunt Books on a characteristically damp February evening. The room fell silent as they took their seats – Cin in blue, Nelson in a coppery brown, the two of them held in gentle focus against the bookstore’s wooden interior. When they spoke, they spoke quietly, searchingly. For an hour, the room remained hushed. The air, flush with their words, felt somehow effervescent.

It was the same feeling you get reading the pair’s debut novels. Though the books differ in premise – Cin’s Keeping the House makes a tender pastiche of Tottenham’s early-noughties heroin trade, while Nelson’s Open Water tracks a romance along the backstreets of present-day London – they share a certain vitality. These are works of love, maps of the city fashioned from the relationships among its inhabitants. In this way, the writers manage to bring a sense of closeness to a sprawling expanse, just as they bring a sense of expansiveness to its most closely-guarded encounters. Cin’s “eroin” operation is no black-suited, blood-soaked chase; it’s light leaking into the local snooker hall, laughter over Turkish coffee, a moment of bliss on the top floor of the bric-à-brac shop, holding hands and watching television after a raid. Soft, beguiling noir. Meanwhile, in Open Water, Nelson’s fated lovers glow violet in the club. The air buzzes.

At Daunt, the conversation kept circling back to the idea of exposure. Cin noted that Open Water introduces its reader to a number of coded spaces. “How do you feel,” she asked Nelson, “knowing that people from outside those communities are seeing those spaces?” He paused, then spoke about the importance of making his people feel seen – a neat reversal of perspectives. He and his narrator are both photographers, after all, and exposure is also a measure of the light that reaches a camera’s film. Behind the viewfinder one accesses a kind of power.

Of course, things are not always so simple. “Careful,” begins Cin’s Keeping the House, “when you turn your eyes towards someone, you allow them the chance to turn theirs on you.” To expose, in other words, is to be exposed, and to be exposed is to be made vulnerable. In Open Water, Nelson’s Black protagonist comes up repeatedly against the brutal glare of law enforcement. In one instance, he is stopped and searched on the way to a party; in another, he passes a dreadlocked boy pressed up against a wall, handcuffed and hedged in by a throng of cops. “Sometimes you forget to be you is to be a Black body,” he says, “and not much else.”

But if the world is relentless in reducing Nelson’s and Cin’s characters to mere matter, the authors offer an ethic of care in response, a form of attention that begins to repair the stripped-down subject. In the bookstore, Cin spoke of “feeling like there’s always another something, a gentle goodness  that runs through things.” In her book, she pillows moments of calamity with that unnamable substance: at the same time a character is revealed to be an addict, there’s a fresh plate of börek being placed on the table. Open Water bears a similar doubleness. James Brown’s scream, in one scene a sound of horror, of a young Black man knocked violently into the road, is in another a sign of life – something full and vital and “waiting to emerge.”

What Cin and Nelson capture so well are the things that exist beyond language – the rhythm, the breath, the tone, the hue. Their stories are patient and recursive. “We circle over the same territory,” Cin writes. “It makes you notice the chip on the surface that you nearly missed.” For these writers, London is home, and home is a place we find in loops.

Photograph at top: Tice Cin and Caleb Azumah Nelson in conversation at Daunt Books, 2022. By Elleke Boehmer.

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and producer from North London. An alumnus of Barbican Young Poets, she now creates digital art as part of Design Yourself, a collective based at the Barbican. She also serves as Community Manager at Tilted Axis Press. Cin’s work has been awarded the 2019 London Writers Award and longlisted for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize. Keeping the House is her debut novel.

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British-Ghanian writer and photographer living in Southeast London. His writing has been published in Litro and The White Review. Nelson’s story “Pray” was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2020, and his photography won the Palm People’s Choice Prize in 2019. His first novel, Open Water, has been awarded a Costa Book Award.

Open Water in Cape Town

Elleke Boehmer

In March 2022 it was my great pleasure to read pages from Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water with students at the University of Cape Town, in a class on narrative and intervention. We focussed on the sections in which the narrator welcomes in the summer in London with a series of refrain-like sentences that begin a number of paragraphs: “It’s summer now …”. These repeat moments are followed by lines like, “You want to write. You want to meet strangers for dinner, and not refuse another drink at another bar” (p. 69). Without prompting, the students responded especially to the poetry of the writing, to the striking rhythms, and how they encouraged identification, the ways in which the words centred them in the narrator’s experience. And this then sparked them to pick up on other things, like on the enticement of meeting strangers for a meal, rather than just friends, and on the process of falling ever so gently and subtly in love. They spoke about bass drums and about immersion. I felt overjoyed to have been able to introduce this talented and attentive London writer into the classroom in Cape Town.

Cite this: Ying, Eileen. “Intimacies: On Tice Cin’s Keeping the House and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2022, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-intimacies-cin-nelson. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Eileen Ying

Lover, thinker, dreamer; razor-edged critic and open-armed activist; radical, riotous Black feminist with a penchant for leaving a room fuller than it began – bell hooks, who passed away in December of 2021, was a gift to all the world. Yet her value too often went unappreciated.  

hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, when Jim Crow – a set of laws that enforced “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and whites – still reigned in the American South. She grew up in the small town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, attended segregated schools up until her teenage years, and studied English at Stanford before pursuing graduate degrees in Wisconsin and California. She published her first work, a chapbook of poems, while teaching at the University of Southern California. Here arose her legendary pen name – a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, styled in lowercase to emphasize substance over identity. In the following decades, hooks would write over forty books on topics ranging from education to masculinity, Appalachia to American film. Throughout, she was staunchly anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist.

In 1991, hooks’s mission to wed critical reflection to political struggle brought her across the Atlantic. It’s an important but little-acknowledged fact that she spoke at the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books, known affectionately as the “Black Book Fair”, and that she frequented London’s historic New Beacon Books. Pluto Press, moreover, has published British editions of her work from the very start. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find her name on any contemporary British syllabus. (My own encounter came, fortuitously, in the US.) Perhaps this is just another instance of academic neglect, or perhaps it speaks to the broader erasure of Black radical history in the UK. Either way, hooks’s death prompts us to revisit a whole treasury of buried wisdom, both hers and that of her comrades.

And this, I think, is where she would have wanted us to look in such a moment. By the time she wrote All About Love in 1999, hooks had developed a kind of serenity in the face of loss. “Love is the only force that allows us to hold one another close beyond the grave,” she insisted. “That is why knowing how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die.” For hooks, the root of all transformation – personal as well as political – lay in our investment in the people around us, in the sort of devotion that left us no choice but to fight for something better.

So today, for hooks, we grieve openly and loudly, and tomorrow we turn that love outwards, to all those who continue to bend towards freedom.

Photograph: bell hooks, 2014. By Alex Lozupone, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Cite this: Ying, Eileen. “Grieving, Loving: On bell hooks.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2022, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-grieving-loving-on-bell-hooks. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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