Much Black British Writing has reflected a metropolitan experience
that is clearly located in London. This event is an opportunity
to hear two leading writers whose work calls for a new look
at how recent Black British writing extends out into many
other areas of British culture and history.
Luke Sutherland is Scotland’s leading
light in hip lit, former singer with indie band Long Fin Killie,
and author of novels Jelly Roll, Venus as a Boy, and Sweetmeat.
Sukhdev Sandhu is a widely published cultural
critic, film critic for the Daily Telegraph, and author of
London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City
and I’ll Get My Coat.
Diran Adebayo, author of the novels Some
Kind of Black and My Once Upon a Time, is the International
Writing Fellow in English in the School of Humanities at the
University of Southampton. He has been hailed as one of the
most original young literary talents around. His first novel,
the acclaimed Some Kind of Black, a nineties' coming of age
story, broke new ground for the London novel, was longlisted
for the Booker Prize and won him the Saga Prize, a Betty Trask
Award, the Authors' Club's 'Best First Novel' Award, and the
Writers Guild's New Writer of the Year for 1996. His second
novel, 'My Once Upon A Time', received more rave reviews.
It was been called "an exhilarating, magical fairytale
for our times" and a novel that "turns the private
eye genre on its head". He has also written stories for
BBC TV and radio, has been a newspaper columnist, and broadcasts
and writes frequently on social and cultural issues for media
ranging from 'The Culture Show' to 'The Guardian'. In 2003,
he co-edited 'New Writing 12'(Picador), an anthology that
showcases new UK and Commonwealth writing. He is currently
writing his third novel, 'The Ballad of Dizzy and Miss P'.
Funded by Arts Council England.
