The prolific and influential American writer Percival Everett has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize with his novel James. James is a rewriting of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with more than one twist in the tale. In this Black History Month discussion, members of the Oxford English Faculty community talk about the many intriguing facets of Everett’s novel, including whether the voice of the character James, Jim in Mark Twain, is convincing, and how the Mississippi River becomes a character in the novel alongside James. The discussion is chaired by Prof. Nicole King.

Read more on the Oxford English Faculty’s website

Cite this: “’James’ by Percival Everett book discussion.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/james-by-percival-everett-book-discussion. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: Griffin, C. J. “On Neoliberal Society: The Aesthetic of the Secret in the Fiction of Jackie Kay.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-griffin-kay-neoliberal-society-secret. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: García-Soriano, Ana. “Liminality and Intimacy in Jackie Kay’s Wish I Was Here (2006).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-garcia-soriano-kay-liminality-intimacy. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: Gish, Nancy. “‘Opening Out’: Jackie Kay’s Many Voices.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-gish-kay-many-voices. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: Kay, Jackie. “Darling.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-jackie-kay-darling. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Interview by Chelsea Haith

In his second collection, A Blood Condition (2021), Kayo Chingonyi presents a voice wise and weary beyond his years. Nominated for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection alongside poets such as Selima Hill and Stephen Sexton, this new work testifies to the depth of Chingonyi’s engagement with history, embodiment, loss, and power. The collection is distinguished by its generic range, comprising prose poems and lyrics, and mingling introspections on grief with the vital aesthetic joy of his first love: rap.

In this interview, Chingonyi explores the formal and thematic concerns of his work, revealing his own personal negotiations with loss and life as he discusses his choices of form and content, and the demands of structure in his work.

The interview ends with a reading of ‘Chingola Road Cemetery’ from the new collection.

Writers Makes Worlds and Chelsea Haith thank Kayo Chingonyi for his time and generosity in granting this interview.

Cite this: “Kayo Chingonyi on Nation, Blood, and Poetic Form.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-kayo-chingonyi-a-blood-condition. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Benjamin Zephaniah, Malachi McIntosh

On 24 June 2021, Benjamin Zephaniah was in conversation with the writer and editor Malachi McIntosh at the Story Museum in Oxford. In the conversation, Zephaniah looks back on watershed moments in his life, and speaks candidly and fiercely about the power of poetry to impact minds and politics. 

Benjamin Zephaniah is one of Britain’s most eminent contemporary poets, best known for his compelling spoken-word and recorded performances. An award-winning playwright, novelist, children’s author, and musician, he is also a committed political activist and outspoken campaigner for human and animal rights. He appears regularly on radio and TV, literary festivals, and has also taken part in plays and films. He continues to record and perform with his reggae band, recently releasing the album Revolutionary Minds. His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.

Malachi McIntosh is editor and publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). His fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature.

Q&A Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director.

The event was organised in association with the Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds project and The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and formed part of the webinar series Art & Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture.

Cite this: “Art & Action: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-art-action-benjamin-zephaniah-in-conversation. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Lyndsey Stonebridge, Elleke Boehmer, and Ankhi Mukherjee

The activity of reading gives us powerful ways of posing and exploring important questions about human rights, representation and justice today. Reading invites us to think together.

In this talk to the Oxford Postcolonial Writing and Theory seminar on 4 May 2021, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers readings from three texts to think about the different timelines—a time of exile, a moment of devastation, a time of waiting without end—that narrative and poetry invite us into. 

Looking at Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946, trans. Willard R. Trask, 1953), Mahmood Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut, 1982 (1986, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi, 1995), and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018, trans. Omid Tofighian, 2019), she argues that writing can help us to relate better to other human life-times.

Lyndsey was speaking about her 2020 collection of essays Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (Oxford UP) in which she makes the case for a renewed collaboration between the work of writing and the politics of human rights.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her other recent books include: Placeless People: Rights, Writing, and Refugees (OUP, 2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize, 2019, and The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). She is currently writing a book, Thinking with Hannah Arendt, which will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2022.

Cite this: “Lyndsey Stonebridge: ‘The Times of Rights and Writing’.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-stonebridge-times-of-rights-and-writing. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Amit Chaudhuri, Elleke Boehmer, and Katherine Collins

Note: there are five separate videos in this interview playlist. They will play automatically, but you can skip ahead using the playlist button in the top right corner of the video above.

Cite this: “A video interview with Amit Chaudhuri about ‘Literary Activism’.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-interview-chaudhuri-literary-activism. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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This Writers Make Worlds and TORCH panel discussion was streamed live on 22 October 2020. It featured the author Johny Pitts in conversation about his ground-breaking travelogue Afropean, his 2019 notes on a journey around contemporary Black Europe. Together with Oxford academics Simukai Chigudu and Elleke Boehmer, Johny Pitts explored questions of black history, hidden archives, decolonization and community, and what it is to be black in Europe today.

Biographies

Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist, and the author of Afropean (2019). His work exploring African-European identity has received numerous awards, including a Decibel Penguin Prize and the Jhalak Prize. He has contributed words and images to the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times.

Elleke Boehmer is a writer, historian, and critic. She is Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her most recent books are Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and To the Volcano (2019). She is currently on a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship working on a project called ‘Southern Imagining’.

Simukai Chigudu is Associate Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Simukai is interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa and his first book The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe came out in 2020. Prior to joining the academy, Simukai was a medical doctor in the UK’s National Health Service.

With thanks to the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford, Oxford Digital Media, and Tom Kirkby.

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