Biography

Writing

Akala at the Hull Jazz Festival, 2015 (Photo: Ben Pugh CC BY 2.0)

Since the publication of Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, Akala has become a prominent commentator on empire and race, both in Britain and globally. Written in the wake of a resurgent white nationalism, Natives is a tour de force of imperial history and anti-racist critique, and a must-read for anyone hoping to understand Britain today. Akala dropped out of college and did not attend university, valuing other forms of community-based knowledge and autodidacticism instead. He has spoken proudly of the pan-African Saturday school he attended as a child, and his aptly named 2012 two-part mixtape, Knowledge is Power, places an emphasis on knowing your own history and your place in the world (“when you hear somebody’s rapping, the base of it is African […] Don’t let them tell you ‘bout yourself”). In 2018, just months after Natives was published, he was awarded no fewer than two honorary doctorates – one from Oxford Brookes University and the other from the University of Brighton – for his book about anti-racist politics and history. As he joked in his Twitter handle for some time afterwards, he is now “Dr Dr Akala”.

Akala’s artistic career extends back far longer than this most recent book, however. His older sister is the ground-breaking female rap artist Niomi Arleen McLean-Daley MBE, otherwise known as Ms Dynamite. Because of his stepfather’s theatrical work, Akala saw “more theatre growing up than any rich child is likely to”, and the power of performance to make new worlds is a central theme in his work. Akala scatters Shakespearean references into much of his hip hop work; in fact, the fourth track on his first studio album, It’s Not a Rumour (2006), is named after the Bard. As he raps on “Shakespeare”:

It’s William back from the dead
But I rap about gats and I’m black instead
It’s Shakespeare, reincarnated.

The lyrics to his later track, “Comedy Tragedy History” (2007), build the titles of twenty-seven Shakespeare plays into its first two verses, which Akala wrote in less than half an hour during a live challenge on BBC Radio 1Xtra. In 2009, he established The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, an organisation leading live events, educational workshops, and theatre productions that reinterpret Shakespeare’s works while at the same time “expanding the Hip Hop art form as a medium of self-expression for the masses”.

Akala remains at once an activist and an artist, as captured once again in his epic poem, “The Ruins of Empires”, an abridged version of which he performed live for the BBC in 2018. Anti-imperialist in his politics and anti-racist in his practice, Akala’s is a holistic vision: he has the ability to see how disparate crises are connected by global histories and the ambition to build worldly solidarities in response. While recognising how tough the struggle for these solidarities can be, in his own life and practice Akala has demonstrated that theatre, performance, and writing must be central to any worthwhile attempt.

—Dominic Davies, 2020

Cite this: Davies, Dominic. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Teju Cole, One World One SFU 2015, SFU Library (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American by origin, but as a writer he eschews exclusive definition by national labels such as Black British or African American, which have been the cornerstones of Anglophone and postcolonial writers before him, in favour of a defiant and provocative global identity. Cole’s work experiments with genre and form, blending fiction and non-fiction and indeed a range of media beyond writing (photography, sound, social media, and more). At his disposal in these border-crossing curatorial works is the full canon of global literature and culture, including, significantly, writing of British origin and with colonial and diasporic preoccupations.

Claiming access to the breadth of interests and influences that he does, Cole draws a distinction between himself and many other writers of the postcolonial (including Nigerian) diaspora, as articulated in an essay on James Baldwin:

He was sensitive to what was great in world art, and sensitive to his own sense of exclusion from it. […] I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. I am not an interloper.

Cole therefore demands subtle and diverse contextualisation, and to read him in relation to a tradition of British migrant and postcolonial writing adds resonance both to that body of work and to Cole’s oeuvre.  His British influences are significant. John Berger, for example, is a palpable and frequently acknowledged force in Cole’s essays, his photo-text work in particular. Cole built a strong friendship with Berger, unburdened by the kinds of historical or racial anxieties Baldwin suffered, and distinct too (though we can’t forget the role of personality in such interactions) from the more fraught relationship he describes with his postcolonial predecessor V. S. Naipaul. The writer to whom Cole is perhaps most often compared is W. G. Sebald, a German author whose immense significance to British writing suggests a template for the kind of relation a writer like Cole could take in turn. Their writing comes alive through the kinds of cultural transpositions that preoccupy them.

Bruce Chatwin (a key influence of Sebald’s) reinvigorated British travel writing in 1979 with In Patagonia, and Cole in turn has adopted the curatorial and polymathic travel writing style Chatwin famously established in that book. In Chatwin’s case it has been associated specifically with his heightened Englishness; for Cole to take such a role and to interact in polyphonic ways with the British canon is a political statement itself, an enactment of the kind of interactive transnational and postcolonial world to which he looks forward.

—Louis Rogers, 2018

Cite this: Rogers, Louis. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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Biography

Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014) is Dasgupta’s most recent published work. Written while he was living in Delhi, it examines the city in the context of India’s rise in the global economy. The book won the 2017 Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, and was short-listed for the Orwell Prize and for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.

Dasgupta established the JCB Prize for literature and served as its literary director from 2017–2019. Among literary prizes in India, the JCB Prize is unique in requiring publishers to submit works in both English and in translation, in order to “help readers across the world discover the very best of contemporary Indian literature”. Dasgupta currently lives in Herefordshire, and is working on his next book, After Nations. He is also an author of essays and short-fiction, which have appeared  in the Financial Times, Granta, The Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times.

Writing

Rana Dasgupta, 2018 (photo: Nina Subin)

Dasgupta’s oeuvre features a continuous literary imagining of the effects and affect of capitalism as a profit-driven system which focuses on individual achievement. The culture of capitalist societies has privileged the concerns of the wealthy and the internationally mobile, but Dasgupta’s works insist on wider psychic and emotional realities. His two novels and one work of literary non-fiction testify to the importance of literary representation in their reference to lived realities. Dasgupta employs different modes of representing the present era through the essay, the documentary and the short story. His fictional characters include an ear-cleaner in Shenzhen and a slum-resident under a flyover in Nigeria, while in Capital he presents real-life technocrats, businessmen, drug-dealers and activists. Taken as a whole, his writing reveals the importance of personal experiences in portraying bewildering and terrifying changes in society. Reflecting on Tokyo Cancelled and Solo after receiving the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Dasgupta asks, “how do you tell a story of the contemporary world that is complex, and reflects all the intensities that we feel?”

All of Dasgupta’s works express a concern with finding a literary form capacious enough to portray the enlarged scale of the world, in time and space. Tokyo Cancelled comprises a story-cycle of folktales narrated on one night in a transit lounge, as travellers await the resumption of air traffic so they can continue their journeys. Structurally, it alludes to Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights, and has been described as “leav[ing] iridescent trails that criss-cross the globe like a flight map”. Solo, by contrast, contains two corresponding texts about the same character: a book of one man’s failures and a book of corresponding reveries In between the two narratives, the immense sense of loss of a life lived under Communism is fully evoked, as well as what one reviewer has described as the “quiet heroism” of a character who remains, against all odds, alive at the end of the book.

Finally, Capital begins and ends with chapters about the historical role of wells and rivers in shaping Delhi, and how its current lack of water symbolises India’s current political and social moment. The body of the work takes readers on a journey through Delhi’s neighbourhoods in a series of encounters and interviews which delve into issues as wide-ranging as the changing role of middle-class women, the continuing effects of partition on North India, and the historical amnesia implicit in the reduction of linguistic diversity. A writer of his time, Dasgupta’s work illustrates the continual engagement of literature with histories that go beyond and change national narratives.

—Ann Ang, 2020

Cite this: Ang, Ann. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 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 9 February 2026.

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Reni Eddo-Lodge in conversation with Rebecca Surender, Oxford, 14 June 2018

Biography

Writing

Reni Eddo-Lodge reading in Oxford, 14 June 2018 (photo: Stuart Bebb)

Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James hailed Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race as a book that was “begging to be written.” The book was borne out of the thoughts she shared on her blog in 2014, and sparked a national conversation in the UK about the blinkered view of race and privilege held by many white people. In the blog post, reproduced in the book, Eddo-Lodge asks the fundamental question of race and class politics in the twenty-first century: “Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?” (6).

She notes in the book that the responses to the post revealed the continued demand by white people that black people articulate their experiences so that white people might better understand them, even by those white people who purport to be aware of their privilege. Despite her desire to quit talking to white people about race, subsequent to the blog post’s viral dissemination Eddo-Lodge has become an icon of intersectional race debates.

In 2018 her book was named the most influential book ever written by a woman, beating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. In an article in 2017, Eddo-Lodge notes that race-related violence had inflected her life long before she became politically active, referring to the racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Her book charts the history of race in the UK, and her own engagement with it through independent research, moving through systemic racism, white privilege and the concomitant fear of the loss of that privilege, through to black feminism, and intersectional concerns of the imbrication of class with race. Eddo-Lodge’s concern with intersectionality reflects a belief that race and class are not distinct systems of oppression, but rather work in tandem.

Before the publication of her award-winning debut, Eddo-Lodge worked as a freelance journalist. She concentrated on questions like cultural appropriation in yoga, and housing inequality in London’s property market, and produced a guide to being a black feminist. Subsequently, she has launched a popular podcast, titled About Race. In it, she further explores the themes she addressed in her book, locating them in contemporary debates, such as Brexit and the Calais refugee camps. In her podcast Eddo-Lodge talks with activists working in refugee camps such as Road to Freedom’s Ra’ed Khan as well as the first black woman to hold a seat in the House of Commons, Shadow Home Secretary MP Diane Abbott, and the actor and rapper Riz Ahmed. Her progressive view of race and intersectional resistance imbues her work with political urgency while her writing and podcasting remain accessible and non-academic, appealing to diverse audiences.

—Chelsea Haith, 2019

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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Writing

Aminatta Forna’s works explore the historical, cultural, and emotional repercussions of societies that have experienced conflict. Her first three books – The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), Ancestor Stones (2006), and The Memory of Love (2010) – are set in Sierra Leone. The Devil that Danced on the Water recounts Forna’s search for the men that killed her father, who was wrongfully hanged in 1975 for treason against Sierra Leonean dictator Siaka Steven’s government. It offers an incisive and moving account of her father’s life and death, while bringing to light the historical background to the civil war that wracked the country from 1991 to 2002. Ancestor Stones tells the intertwined stories of four women, all cousins, whose different mothers were in a polygamous marriage with patriarch Gibril. Set in an unnamed West African country that closely resembles Sierra Leone, the novel is an exploration of family, history, and female agency. The Memory of Love is an intergenerational story of passionate obsession and betrayal, set in pre- and post-civil war Sierra Leone.

In her most recent novel, The Hired Man, her geographical focus shifts to Croatia, inviting parallels between how it and Sierra Leone have negotiated the aftermaths of their largely contemporaneous experiences of civil war. In her own words:

I wanted to move the action beyond the African continent and into the west, where I would invite readers to reconsider some of their assumptions about wars all over Africa.

Forna unsettles readers’ preconceptions, both by such acts of unexpected transnational comparison, and by telling the stories of those marginalised from public view. Her meticulously researched books often feature ordinary people buffeted by historical currents beyond their control, allowing readers to engage emotionally in individual lives while gaining perspective on a broad canvas of societal change.

—Graham Riach, 2017

Cite this: Riach, Graham. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Romesh Gunesekera, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2012 (Photo: Stanny Angga, CC BY 2.0)

Most of Romesh Gunesekera’s works are set in his native Ceylon, or Sri Lanka from the 1960s. His fiction opens an expansive window onto the ethereal, yet politically tumultuous country of his growing-up years. Featuring quotidian scenarios against the backdrop of the nation’s civil unrest, the writer elevates Ceylon from an obsolete geo-political entity to memorialise it as an evocative juncture in Sri Lanka’s divided history. Memorable, well-fleshed out characters feature throughout Gunesekera’s works; from the various servants that work under the entitled, oppressive yet vulnerable Sri Lankan elite to the England-based diaspora.

Alongside themes of cultural identity, memory and desire, a recurrent thread in his stories is of inter-class kinships, best seen in his first novel Reef (1994), which was nominated for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Widely acclaimed as a stylistic masterpiece for its dextrous wordplay and sensuous descriptions of the Sri Lankan landscape and cuisine, the novel tells the story of the child chef Triton, who seeks a gastronomical route to the heart of his employer, an upper-class marine biologist ‘Mister Salgado’. As communal tensions grip the nation and interrupt their lives, Gunesekera demonstrates how ‘the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions.’

Speaking at the 2020 Liverpool Literary Festival, Gunesekera traced his beginnings as an anglophone writer to Liverpool, where he understood the craft of ‘language on a page’ through the city’s numerous bookstores and public libraries. His works are therefore at once British and Sri Lankan in their narration of place and identity. For instance, The Sandglass (1998) and Heaven’s Edge (2002) straddle the different temporal and geographical poles of Britain and Sri Lanka to explore diasporic experiences. Prominently, Heaven’s Edge merges the author’s characteristic historical fiction with the realms of fantasy and speculative fiction by imagining a violent, dystopian Sri Lankan future.

Over the years, alongside six novels and three short fiction collections, Gunesekera has written prolifically across forms and non-literary genres. His essays, poetry, and short fiction have been published in anthologies and magazines such as The New Yorker, Time, Granta, Paris Review, London Magazine, Wasafiri, Kunapipi, and elsewhere. In a more experimental vein, Noontide Toll (2014) eludes immediate formal classification as a series of inter-linked short stories.  He has also written content for radio and co-authored Novel Writing: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (2015) with Scottish writer AL Kennedy. His latest work is Suncatcher (2019), a novel that revisits the world of postcolonial Sri Lanka, this time through the adolescent worldviews of its protagonists, Kairo and Jay.

—Amrita Shenoy, 2021

Cite this: Shenoy, Amrita. “Romesh Gunesekera.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/romesh-gunesekera. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Xiaolu Guo in Europe, 2008, Matt Spark (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

In A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), Guo portrays a year in the life of Z, a Chinese woman who moves to London to study English. Z’s narration is written in broken English that improves over the course of the novel, reflecting Z’s process of learning the language and immersing the reader into the alienating inaccessibility of communication in a foreign country.

These issues of communication persist in Guo’s writing, who since 2007 has published works written in English. She often experiments with form and perspective to depict the experience of cross-cultural communication, exploring both language barriers and cultural differences that cause conflict between the characters in her novels. Guo, who speaks English, Mandarin and Zhejiang dialect, explains the cultural duality of language in her writing: ‘I cannot express my thoughts with only one language… I try to write a transcript which is in both Chinese and English, a text that is alive and true for both cultures I am living in.’

In Lovers in the Age of Indifference (2010), Guo places traditional short stories alongside those written in the form of letters, emails and text messages. Guo examines the complexity of communication in the age of modern technology, in which international relationships are more accessible yet intimacy is often still barred by emotional and cultural distances.

Guo draws from both Chinese folklore and modern politics to blend a lyrical tone with the investigation of social values in contemporary China and Britain. Her recurring depictions of cultural displacement are in part inspired by her own experience of moving to Europe from China, which she explores further in her 2017 memoir Once Upon A Time in the East.

—Clara Irvine, 2017

Cite this: Irvine, Clara. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 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 9 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Miller’s first book Fear of Stones and other stories (2006) was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and he has subsequently won the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde, the Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence, the Prix Les Afriques, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature twice, for both fiction and his most recent novel Augustown (2016). James Procter describes Miller’s first novel The Same Earth as a book that ‘more than demonstrates the author’s ability as a captivating storyteller full of wit, and lively satirical intelligence’. His poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion received particular critical acclaim, culminating in his being the first writer of colour to be awarded the Forward Prize. The chair of the judges Jeremy Paxman noted: ‘Many poets refer to multiple realities, different ways of observing the world. Kei doesn’t just refer, he articulates them’.

Yet, even alongside the acclaim for his poetic work, Kei Miller tends to see the essay as his primary literary form. Certainly, it is the means through which he thinks through his fascinations with language, meaning and the body. Miller’s recent essay In Praise of the Fat Black Woman & Volume is representative of the lyricism of his essay style, dramatizing many of the early poetic influences upon his work and intellectual life. The Jamaican performance poet Staceyann Chin is one such influence – a voluble, dynamic and driven figure. Though he is a soft-spoken and always reflective writer, Miller’s poetry is at the same time loud in its critique of British imperialism and cultural hubris, and equally of the Jamaican middle class. As in the linked interview, recorded at the 2019 ACLALS conference in Auckland, New Zealand, he observes that he doesn’t mind if his work is overheard by outsiders, but that he writes primarily for and about Jamaica. Miller juxtaposes characters and images in such a way that his poems flow like an ongoing conversation. We listen now to a single speaker musing to himself, now to a dialogue see-sawing between impassioned interlocutors. Miller is one of the most exciting voices on the British literary scene today whose work appeals and resonates across a wide range of audiences.

—Chelsea Haith, 2019

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 9 February 2026.

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