Selma Dabbagh and Courttia Newland in conversation during the Great Writers Inspire at Home workshops, Oxford, August 2017

Overview

Her first novel, Out of It, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011, first in English though it was later translated into Arabic by Khulood Amr under the title Gaze Tahta Al-Jild (Gaza Under The Skin) in 2015, as well as into French and Italian in 2016. Dabbagh is also the author of a number of short stories which have been published in magazines and journals as diverse as Wasafiri, Saqi and Telegram, as well as a number of anthologies including Granta and International PEN. As this latter publication might indicate, she has for a long time worked closely with PEN International, a global organisation of writers and activists who are committed to the power of literature as a peace-building force able to create mutual understanding between different cultures and nations across the world. Her written work often engages with issues such as these, exploring the permeable lines and moments of friction between culture and resistance, literature and activism – even as Dabbagh herself practises both.

In addition to her prose fiction, Dabbagh has also written drama, including a celebrated radio play that was produced by BBC Radio 4, broadcast in January 2014, entitled The Brick. The play dramatises the day-to-day experience of Palestinian life by telling the story of a Palestinian woman attempting to travel through contemporary Jerusalem, shaped as it is by numerous permits, road blocks and checkpoints, whilst countering these with the Palestinian’s rich cultural heritage and deep familial roots. Dabbagh also regularly writes reviews and short articles for important Palestinian online publications such as Electronic Intifada, and has contributed blogs and other journalistic pieces for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She regularly appears at international literary festivals in Britain and Palestine, as well as other places across the world, where she reads from her work; she has also on occasion taught creative writing workshops in schools and universities.

—Dominic Davies, 2017

Cite this: Davies, Dominic. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Kwame Dawes, Poetas de los cinco continentes, Di / Verso 2017, by Mariano Castillo / Secretaría de Cultura CDMX (CC-BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr

All Kwame Dawes’s work is pervaded by a conviction that writing, and in particular poetry, matters intensely to how we understand the world and relate to one another. This is also evident in the several plays he has written, acted in, directed and produced, most recently One Love at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. In 2007 he released A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals including the London Review of Books, Granta, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Among his many awards and prizes are a Pushcart Prize, a Musgrave Medal, the 2019 Windham-Campbell prize, and an Emmy for HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica. In 2018 he was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an honorary position held in the past by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds aims to recognise the ways in which Black and Asian British writers confront particular challenges in their writing careers, not least the tendency for institutions, including the publishing industry, to overlook and mishear their voices. Founded in 2012 by Dawes, the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) seeks to address this problem directly by publishing and promoting the work of African poets, including those of the diaspora. Writers Make Worlds is especially delighted to feature the APBF, and this panel discussing their work, convened by Dawes. In the UK, poets published by the APBF include: Warsan Shire, Janet Kofi-Tsekpo, Mary-Alice Daniel, Nick Makoha, and Victoria Adukwei Bulley.

—Katherine Collins, 2019

Cite this: Collins, Katherine. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Inua Ellams, 2009. Photo: Kim-Leng (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Ellams’s lyricism and cultural references point to influences ranging from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the intellectual playfulness of Terry Pratchett, with a strong undertow running throughout of Nigerian oral literature or orature. Critic and writer Delia Jarrett-Macauley highlights the success of Ellams’s ‘linguistic, but low-key virtuosity’, as strikingly demonstrated in the lines written for his stage characters. Inspired by his heroes, the Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri, Ellams’s poems and plays tell stories of his own life and those of others’ that are infused with the myths, legends, market gossip and lively cultural intermingling of his birth country.

Writing about Ellams’s dramatic work, Nigerian critic Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu notes that the solo drama style of his play The 14^th Tale reflects characteristic dramatizations in Nigeria of the outsider figure who struggles to come to terms with their identity and with fate. For Nwaozuzu, the play’s protagonist is a ‘split personality who battles with inherited personal demons and the need to chart a social identity’ during his youth in Nigeria and later in the diaspora. At the same time, he embodies the classical image of the Greek hero at the mercy of fate. Another of Ellams’s influences, Wole Soyinka, writes about characters beset by internal conflict in comparable ways, such as in a play like The Road. Here we see Ellams bringing together and channelling influences from European and Nigerian dramatic traditions into the British dramatic scene.

Ellams’s first full poetry collection The Actual / Fuck began its life as an anti-Trump project tentatively called ‘Fuck 45’ that Ellams composed on buses, trains and in the in-between moments of his busy life (Armitstead, The Guardian, 2019). His target was clearly the populist right-wing nationalism of the 45^th president of the United States, and the way in which Donald Trump’s values revealed that country’s divided consciousness. Drawing also upon his own experiences of troubled national myth-making, Ellams’s collection comprises fifty-five poems that engage passionately with themes of empire, nationalism, and racism, while also calling out the corroding, toxic effects of some forms of masculinity.

Speaking about his writing process at the Oxford Playhouse Search Party online event in November 2020, Ellams observed that many of his ideas first start as poems and then move into dramatic and dialogue forms that are further fleshed out on stage. He feels therefore that he is first and foremost a poet. However, all of his work grows out of his two major thematic and experiential influences: his odyssey as a migrant to Britain, and his experience of finding ways to belong in his new country. His journey from Jos, Nigeria to London via Dublin at the age of twelve is an especially major influence on his stage work and is frequently alluded to if not directly referenced in his plays, especially in his early work. His poems deal prominently with questions of being-in-place, and of cultural differences experienced in the African diaspora.

Ellams’s work is produced  in the moment and he shares it generously, drawing on the world as he sees it and performing off the cuff at the audience’s whim. In performance, he is innovative and daring. For example, he often uses an app to search for and share poems using single words suggested by the audience. His virtuoso mix of deep cross-cultural allusion with technological innovation is reflected in his recognition as one of the Royal Society of Literature’s 40 under 40 writers.

—Chelsea Haith, 2021

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Evaristo’s work spans times, places, and literary genres, often exploring what she has called ‘the hidden narratives of the African diaspora’ and ‘cross[ing] the borders of genre, race, culture, history, and […] sexuality’. From The Emperor’s Babe (2001), set in multicultural Roman London in the 3^rd century CE, to the semi-autobiographical Lara, which traces its path across seven generations and three continents, Evaristo’s work reimagines neglected histories in vibrant, evocative ways. Challenging the reader to contemplate the past and its legacy in the present, Blonde Roots (2008) inverts the racial dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade, depicting a world in which Europeans are enslaved by Africans, while her most recent novel, Mr Loverman (2013), examines sexuality and societal pressures through the experience of her Antiguan-born, London-living protagonist.

Bernardine Evaristo (Photo: Hayley Madden)

Adeptly combining verse and prose, Evaristo’s writing defies easy categorisation in a way that simultaneously reflects the refusal of her characters to be pigeon-holed into one, singular identity. She has made the form of the ‘verse novel’ her own, utilising her earlier experience of theatre and performance to infuse her work with a rhythm, tone, and voice that allows her writing to straddle the boundaries between the written and the spoken word. As author Ali Smith has observed, ‘Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life’.

—Justine McConnell, 2017

Cite this: McConnell, Justine. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Jackie Kay, 2016 (Photo: First Minister of Scotland, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Since her first attempt at writing a novel aged twelve – One Person, Two Names – Kay has written a myriad of works for adults and children: two novels, several poetry and short-story collections, a memoir, an autobiography, and plays for the stage and radio. She has received countless accolades for her work: most notably, a Saltire Society Literary Award for First Book of the Year (1992), a Lammy for Transgender Literature (1999), an MBE (2006), Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature (2002), a CBE (2020), and her aforementioned tenure as the Scots Makar (2016–2021).

Nevertheless, Kay’s writing maintains a critical and interrogative relationship towards both Britain and Scotland. Originally produced in 2007 for BBC R3’s ‘Abolition Season’, Kay’s play The Lamplighter (2008) marks the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade by exploring the impact of Scotland’s role in that inhuman enterprise:

It was a not so delicious irony that the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery was also the tricentenary of the union between Scotland and England, a union which allowed Scotland to profit from the slave trade in a big way (Kay 2020 [2008]: vii).

Alongside criticising the Union’s role in the slave trade, Kay has attacked the social, economic, and cultural legacy of Thatcherism in Britain, the punishment of asylum seekers and refugees by the state, the presence of Trident in Scotland, and the jingoistic nativism of contemporary politics. Kay’s creative critiques of the British union resonate with her broader focus on isolated outsiders and fragile relationships in the context of social identity. Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and class are threaded throughout Kay’s work. This perhaps motivates her abiding concern with ‘the presence absence makes’ (Kay and Young, 2016: 32:10–32:16)  which intersects with Kay’s focus on dis/harmony of multiple identities, transformation and metamorphosis, death and grief, (unrequited) love and loneliness, memory and memorialisation, and the need for community – ‘a whole new life’ (Kay 1993: 41).

Cumulatively, Kay’s work stands in the space between ‘status quo’ and ‘outsider’. Not only does it provide a critical examination of Britain and who belongs in it, but it also forms a crucial contribution to imagining the possibility of a post-British society.

—C. J. Griffin, 2021

Cite this: Griffin, C. J. “Jackie Kay.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/jackie-kay. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

From the 1980s, Hanif Kureishi, the British-born, mixed-race Indian/Pakistani and English writer, playwright and filmmaker, has redefined British multiculturalism and what it means to be British.

Published in 1990, Hanif Kureishi’s coming-of-age novel The Buddha of Suburbia evolved out of a short story of the same title. The autobiographical strain in both made perfect sense to him. For, read though Kureishi might, he could find no half-Asian boy protagonists in British literature, no stories about growing up mixed-race in the suburbs in which someone like him made it to centre-stage. […] The novel The Buddha of Suburbia dramatises the combustible intersection of the absorbing, colliding social worlds its mixed-raced narrator Karim occupies. In their formative years, Karim and his friend Jamila experiment with a range of identities because they are not allowed to be English: ‘sometimes we were French, Jammie and I, and other times we went black American. The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wog and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it’ (The Buddha of Suburbia 35). In this and related ways The Buddha of Suburbia not only shifts our understandings of ‘Britishness’ and ‘belonging’, but presciently identified these key questions of identity that would resonate and remain hotly contested for decades to come. (from Writing the Self 312; 329)

—Edited extract from the biography by Ruvani Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self (Manchester University Press, 2023).

—Ruvani Ranasinha, 2025

Cite this: Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Hanif Kureishi.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2025, https://writersmakeworlds.com/hanif-kureishi. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Kwame Kwei-Armah, 2008, Chermiah (CC BY-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Kwei-Armah’s plays are motivated by an unmistakable social imperative: he writes accurately and compassionately to describe the communities around him and ‘to be catalyst for a debate’ within them. His plays unfold in ‘forums’ of various kinds, peopled by characters who are both representative and questioning of the social, racial, and generational categories they represent.

In Elmina’s Kitchen (2003), three generations (plus an offstage fourth) of African Caribbean men grapple with conflicting ideas of their heritage and future. The Kitchen is the single location for the play’s turbulent and finally bloody proceedings, watched over by a portrait of the deceased matriarch Elmina. It went on to form the first part of a loose trilogy for the National Theatre about the African diaspora in contemporary Britain. Fix Up (2004) is again a play and a place, this time a ‘Black-conscious’ bookshop, the kind in which Kwei-Armah says he gained much of his own education. The elderly West Indian shop owner, young mixed-race girl, and reformed crack addict among its characters act as ciphers for the groups and issues they bring into the shop, but also question the functionality of such ciphers as the play becomes more morally and emotionally complex. By Statement of Regret (2007), the debating-chamber aspect of Kwei-Armah’s playing spaces is at the fore, with the action set in a Black political think tank where we hear ‘constant overlapping by others who have often got the argument before a sentence has been completed’ (stage directions). Kwei-Armah can be read as a fine classical dramatist who astutely presents debates on-stage in order to provoke them off-stage. However, that account might not capture the humour or disarming emotion in his plays, which never forget that their intellectual or cultural dramas are human dramas through and through.

Kwei-Armah has expanded beyond that founding trilogy into wider stories about immigration and continent-hopping musical epics, but his sense of the theatrical remains fixed to character and language. Kwei-Armah’s characters – first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Britain – are destabilised and even made vulnerable by their in-between cultural identities. Many of them, like Kwei-Armah himself, slip between accents and idiolects – ‘refined West Indian,’ ‘classic Black London’, ‘Nigerian but never in the office’. But the flexibility and force of these identities are also empowering: not simply weighed down by complex heritage, his characters are also bolstered, and, perhaps most significantly, they learn to move freely and creatively from their bearings. Nowhere is this effervescent potential as vivid as in the fast-moving, polyphonic language itself. ‘You’ve lost it, blood,’ Ashley says to his father in Elmina’s Kitchen, who replies in a ‘flash of temper’, ‘I’m not no blood wid you.’ The answer comes, ‘Regrettably, that’s exactly what you are.’

—Louis Rogers, 2018

Cite this: Rogers, Louis. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Newland’s early novels depict community and family life on London housing estates. The Scholar (1997) and Society Within (1999), both set in Greenside Estate in West London, use realism to portray contemporary life in the city for his young black protagonists. Newland represents with authenticity the experiences and style of speech of young people through dialect and slang, which Newland also uses to represent Caribbean patois in later short stories.

Originally aspiring to be a rapper, Newland released a drum and bass record before becoming an author. As a writer, this influence is felt in the infusion of music into many of his narratives. A Book of Blues (2011), a collection of short stories with a wide breadth of distinct voices and perspectives, is partly inspired by the sounds and emotional power of blues music. Music is used in this collection to invoke settings from the Miami club scene to the hip hop craze of London in 1988, while also providing the blues motifs of love and loneliness that he explores in this collection.

While Newland is concerned with exploring Black British culture in his writing, his work shows a diverse interest in genre that defies a single categorisation of him as an author. Newland has most recently examined maternal loss in The Gospel According to Cane (2013), after publishing the detective thriller Snakeskin (2002) and exploring the macabre in Music for the Off-Key (2006). Newland’s experimentation with form and genre has sometimes conflicted with the critical pigeonholing of his writing:

As someone first published for my council-estate tales of crime and poverty, I’ve always viewed the contrast between industry acceptance of my early work and the lack of interest in work that doesn’t conform to black working-class stereotypes an affront to my free speech.

—Clara Irvine, 2017

Cite this: Irvine, Clara. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Caryl Phillips, Calabash Literary Festival 2007, Georgia Popplewell (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Caryl Phillips is one of the major British writers of his generation. He is, however, known to be resistant to pigeonholing and to all the labels that have repeatedly tried to circumscribe his art. This is partly due to his multiple cultural affiliations but also to the impressive diversity of his talents. He is the author of several plays, of scripts for radio, television and the cinema, and is also a prolific writer of essays. But Phillips is best-known as a novelist and has so far published ten novels for which he has received major awards. His work shows a deep sense of moral responsibility to the history that has produced him and which has all too often been silenced or at least only partially represented. This is true from his first novelabout West Indian emigration to England, The Final Passage (1985) to his latest, The Lost Child (2015), which interweaves the story of a twentieth-century broken family with that of Emily Brontë’s.

Caryl Phillips and Elleke Boehmer, Literary Leicester Festival 2015

While Phillips’s writing conveys a deep understanding of the impact of exile on the culture and psyche of the West Indies, its original contribution is to show that Caribbean migration is part of British history and therefore participates in the construction of a new British sensibility. Moreover, Phillips’s compassionate engagement with lonely, marginalized characters helps us to transgress such artificial boundaries as race, gender and nation, and calls into question the myths of homogeneity that all too often underlie colonising impulses, both personal and collective. This is why Phillips’s work affords an uncompromising, yet eminently humane, reflection on the composite societies in which we live.

—Bénédicte Ledent, adapted from her work on the Caryl Phillips Bibliography, 2017

Cite this: Ledent, Bénédicte. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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Biography

At seventeen, he invested all the money he had to self-publish his first collection of poems, Perceptions of the Pen. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Manchester, the city that would have the biggest impact on his life and career. His first book of poetry, Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist, was published in 1988, and he has since released almost two-dozen works across multiple forms: poetry, memoir, theatre, documentary, and a book of poems for young people, The Emperor’s Watchmaker (2000). His reputation resulted in an MBE in 2010, and his selection as poet of the London Olympics in 2012. Since 2015, he has been the Chancellor of the University of Manchester (a role he will maintain until 2022), a post he accepted one year after becoming a Fellow of the Foundling Museum. He has also collaborated closely with the Southbank Centre, World Book Night, and the Letterbox Club, and is Canterbury’s Poet Laureate. He received the PEN Pinter Prize in 2019, and is a 2020 Booker Prize judge. These many accolades attest to his multifaceted abilities which span and connect disciplines: literature, academia, museum curation, and activism. He is one of Britain’s preeminent creative voices whose (birth) name is finally being given the respect it deserves.

Writing

Lemn Sissay, 2010  (image by Philosophy Football, CC-BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

In Sissay’s own words: ‘Everything I know about myself comes from Manchester’. His poetry is not only imbued with depictions of the great Northern city, but the city itself is alive with his words. His ‘Landmark Poems’ installation project appears on surfaces throughout Manchester (as well as London), showcasing the interdependence between his writing and the lived spaces which inspire and nurture it. This intermedial approach to literature allows visual mediums – from stone sculptures to spray painting – to make his poetry communal and widely accessible. Sissay’s career has long grappled with how to publicly inspire others through verse, including young people (as his children’s poetry collection demonstrates). This, in turn, reveals the other major source of influence on his works: the traumas of his childhood and family life.

His 2019 memoir, My Name is Why, is a harrowing recollection of his upbringing and time in care. The text intersects prose with scanned fragments of official documents, like his 1967 foster parent agreement form, creating a palimpsest of an identity which was still in formation: he was not yet Lemn, but still trapped in the ‘Norman’ created (textually) by white agents in a post-‘Rivers of Blood’ Britain. At times, therefore, the first-person of the work has to compete with the crushing third-person of unsympathetic state employees who routinely dehumanise ‘Norman’ as a burden they are unwilling to help or take responsibility for. Detailing his feelings of isolation and the discrimination he faced, Sissay notes that ‘Bob Marley was my first black mentor, my first black friend’. And what of family? In a 2012 TED Talk, Sissay jokes that ‘as a child of the state’, his mother was Margaret Thatcher. This speech, which subtly mixes humour with pathos, notes that orphaned figures are the keystones of global fiction – from Moses to Jane Eyre and even Luke Skywalker – and it is from this background that he found the means to create and, from those creations, the attainment of some level of personal freedom: ‘In creativity I saw light. In the imagination I saw the endless possibility of life, the endless truth, the permanent creation of reality’.

Similarly, in the foreword to the published script for his play, Something Dark (premiering in 2005), Sissay recalls how ‘now I was free of the system and away from its twisted curators’, having turned 18, ‘I needed to speak’. This desperation to find truth and belonging is evident, not only in this play based on his early lived experiences, but in the poems collected in Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist (1988), Rebel Without Applause (1992), and Morning Breaks in the Elevator (1999). Trauma and abandonment are the themes at the forefront of many of his compositions which aim for catharsis through expression. In 2013, he staged an adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy which tells the story of a displaced child reaching Britain after being forced to leave Ethiopia and Eritrea. This version of the novel for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, not unlike Sissay’s poetry, makes public and poignant the experiences of children neglected by adults across the world whose bureaucracies break up families and depersonalise individual lives. In some ways, the city of Manchester was the only, or the best, family Sissay ever had, and this fact, with all its sadness and its celebration of metropolitan life, is the central subject of his powerful writing.

Appropriately, the name Lemn means Why in Amharic, and Sissay’s works never stop asking questions about what it means to live in modern, postcolonial Britain and why it remains a place of inequality and detachment for many.

—Daniele Nunziata, 2020

Cite this: Nunziata, Daniele. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 16 April 2026.

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