Johny Pitts
@johnypitts
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Words & images. Author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. Mostly on IG: Agent: @sprungsultan
London / Marseille
Joined April 2009
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So proud to have worked with some brilliant photographers and the amazing team at Hayward to bring an off kilter and counterintuitive look at working class culture MADE BY working class artists: After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024
OPENING IN ONE MONTH…. Hayward Gallery Touring’s After the End of History: Contemporary Working Class Photography 1989 - 2024 will launch 29 March 2024. Curated by Johnny Pitts (
@johnypitts
) exploring life through the lenses of working class practitioners
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My old teacher Mrs Turner, who taught me German, came to see my Home Is Not A Place show at Graves Gallery Sheffield. She’s standing next to one of my best mates who works there, and by a photo in an adjacent box exhibition of her son, Alex Turner, from Arctic Monkeys!
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One of my proudest things is seeing my daughter read for pleasure. She always asks if she can stay up late to read and I always have to pretend to begrudgingly allow it but really I’m bursting with joy.
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Fact of the day: My Dad Richie sung the end credit theme tune for Blackadder the 3rd. Every few years, right up until he died, he’d still get a cheque for a couple of hundred quid for it.
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6 years ago, when I couldn’t get commissioned to write about problematic statues, I took it upon myself to travel to the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, to write for my own platform. Here is an 8 part essay/photo essay about Marvin Gaye & King Leopold II:
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Really pleased to announce that ‘Home is not a Place’, my new collaboration with
@rrobinson72
documenting Black Britain in photographs and poems, designed by the brilliant
@_TomEtherington
is available to pre-order now from your favourite bookstore/ online space!
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At my first hostel on the Afropean trip I hung out with this dude. I was trying to write a book, he was busking on the Paris Metro. Years later David Byrne, who coined Afropean with Zap Mama, hears about my book and invites me to his show at the 02. Guess who his support act is?
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Would love to do an Afropean radio show; French Hip Hop, Swedish Soul, German Grime, Russian Afrobeat. And the genres that emerge as totally unique to a local area.
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After a week in which I’ve picked up two international book awards and won a fellowship, If I needed bringing back down to Earth I walk out my house this morning and some dude comes up to me and asks if I sell weed 🙄
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Neda Koochakian Fard's wonderful
@jhalakprize
sculpture arrived in the post last week. I'll be donating the prize money to the Hadfield Institute, who operate the Sheffield BAMER Covid 19 Action Group, offering frontline support to vulnerable communities:
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Really happy to officially announce the show I’m curating for the
@haywardgallery
: ‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024’
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Afropean wins the Prix Européen de l’essai! It aims to ‘draw attention to work that offers a fertile critique of current societies’. ‘fertile critique’ - I like that! Proud to join Amin Maalouf’s les identités meurtrières, a quote from which opens my book
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In his obituary for Rajat Neogy, Paul Theroux wrote; "We made our introductions through our work, and met in person later, which is the right sequence for writers to get acquainted". That sums up the description of my job as a new host of BBC Radio 4's Open Book! Chuffed!
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How cool is this bilingual short story dispenser at Calais Frethun train station!?
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Let the Illuminati use me as a human experiment, let Bill Gates implant a microchip through a needle to monitor my soul, long as I can take a Eurostar & walk along the Seine at dusk with loved ones again… so good to be back in Paris! Onwards to Marseille!
#fullyvaccinated
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Since winning the Booker Prize
@BernardineEvari
has done nothing but use her huge moment to shine the light on other, lesser known writers, and I’ve been one of the many beneficiaries of her generosity. Thanks again, Bernardine. For everything.
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When I was living in Le Panier, Marseille, I found a crate of nearly 2000 Kodachrome slides discarded on the street. Only had a couple boxes scanned but already it's an extraordinary document of the city's multiculturalism from 1970 to 1990. Will need due process but Stay tuned!
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Unbelievable! Sorry for the babbling words after, I was genuinely caught off guard because of the quality of the shortlist. Thank you!!!
Congratulations to
@johnypitts
who has won the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2020 for his book ‘Afropean: Notes from Black Europe'!
And congratulations to all shortlisted authors!
Judges comments and more info:
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This morning at 11:30 on
@BBCRadio4
I’m narrating the story of
@WarpRecords
, and looking at the broken postindustrial landscape of my home town of Sheffield in the 80s and 90s, from which the sounds emerged…
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My 7 y/o took loads of photos in Japan, so we chose an album for them while we were there. She chose the most basic one, and when she saw my face she said “you’re wondering why aren’t you? It’s because I don’t want the design to be louder than the content” and my heart exploded.
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There’s nothing that makes me more proud, as a Dad, than seeing my seven year old daughter voluntarily pick up a book and read for pleasure. Here she is on a Shinkansen to Hiroshima this afternoon.
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One thing I clutch onto, in the writing profession, when it doesn’t pay the type of bucks I’d need to get a mortgage in London, is Marx’s theory of alienation. To see where my labour has gone; hold it, share it, feel myself in the final product, is something.
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Tomorrow on Open Book I'll be travelling in the timeline of Black British literature, exploring presence, nostalgia, and how we might build upon the recent success of Black authors w/
@CalebANelson
,
@simartin
,
@BernardineEvari
, Nicola Williams & more
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So excited to announce my forthcoming collaboration with a good friend whose work I've long admired
@rrobinson72
- Our book will be a visual poem with Roger's words & my photos. (Check the grizzled image of us in Marseille, looking like characters out of a Claude McKay novel)😂
Roger Robinson (
@rrobinson72
) and
@JohnyPitts
collaborate at
@WmCollinsBooks
for visual poem Home Is Not a Place, exploring the complexity, strength and resilience of Black Britishness
(£)
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This is the house my Great Grandfather George Washington Pitts lived in in the late 1800s. His parents were born slaves. At 14 my Grandma Seppie left her job as a sharecropper and joined the Great Migration in 1930 to work as a maid in Brooklyn. This stuff wasn't a long time ago!
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Two working class hangovers I constantly have to battle are; limiting myself to the sale rail at a clothes shop, and refusing to miss, under any circumstances, even to the detriment of my sleep, a hotel breakfast if it is included in the room rate.
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I’m curating a big touring show abt British working class photography from the last 35 years & though I knew the work would be good, seeing it all in one place is astonishing. Can’t believe the talent & creativity that has emerged out of places where no one was asking for it to.
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In the past week I’ve interviewed Anne Enright, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ben Lerner. Hosting Open Book on
@BBCRadio4
is a crash course in big ideas and beautiful, challenging writing.
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In Mississippi, I asked someone why socialism was a dirty word when there is so much poverty, (& 2nd highest homicide rate in US). “Because nobody here identifies as poor”, he told me; “they’re just not rich YET”. I think this explains lack of working class solidarity globally
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I can’t get my head around how so many working class people I know see Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage as the ‘everyman’. Imagine a story about Farage losing his Coutts account being spun into a story about him standing up to the global elite!?!?
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The first thing I’m gonna do when travel restrictions are lifted is take a train to Paris and go for a long walk. I’m going to stop off for a cool glass of white wine and a simple lunch, take some lazy photographs in the afternoon, then dine at my favourite Senegalese restaurant.
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It’s the first time my daughter Célia has expressed interest in what I do for work, and she is very protective of her copy of Home is not a Place. She not only asked me to sign it, but also made a ‘signed by the author’ sticker! The book includes a photo of her at Stone Henge.
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I wrote the 1st draft of Afropean longhand, on five notebooks. I’m convinced writing with a pen is a deeper experience than typing, but it was a nightmare when it came to type it up (300K words) later. As I formulate my next work I don’t know whether of not to go straight to PC!?
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A year ago today, my Dad Richie passed away. Found loads of negatives in his flat when we were clearing it out and had them digitised as part of the archive I’m building. These are some of my faves: his time building ‘international friendship’ as a singer in 70s Soviet Bulgaria!
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Opening up THAT conversation in Germany. German translation of Afropean is out today! / Afropäisch: Eine Reise durch das schwarze Europa wird morgen veröffentlicht!
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Thinking of those who lost their lives crossing the English Channel early this morning, and
@rrobinson72
’s powerful poem in Home is not a Place. I used to create with the belief a creative act could serve as a preventative, now I realise all you can really do is bear witness.
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I just found out that these fences I walk past every day in Camberwell, are made out of old stretchers used to carry the injured and dead during World War 2. I love how even London’s banality is layered.
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My Book Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, is available to pre-order now. Really recommend the Hardback edition - it does the most justice to the photographic element: . Here's a snippet from an accompanying short film I've been working on, also coming soon
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I’m so proud to announce that my solo show ‘Home is not a Place’, based on my book collab with
@rrobinson72
is coming to London
@TPGallery
I will also be showing some new work about 80s Japan!
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After Trump’s behaviour in this US election I don’t ever want to hear right-wingers talk about ‘remoaners’ and snowflake liberals who can’t accept results if they don’t go their way.
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Wild to see my Afropean photographs installed in a public square in Amsterdam alongside the exhibition
@foam_amsterdam
- specially selected by children from the local community.
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My Dad Richie passed last week. His funeral is on Tuesday & it happens I’m hosting Pick of the Week tomorrow, on what would’ve been his 81st birthday. So I’m dedicating the show to him, inviting listeners to reflect on love, life and loss with the help of some great Radio 4 shows
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People in your 20s DON’T worry about getting your shit together. You have the opportunity to be time-rich, and should use it to dream. If you have to work a BS job, make sure you spend most of it sciving and daydreaming (I used to write poetry on the back of B&Q till receipts)
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I see a book as a type of architecture. Here is a behind the scenes masterplan I constructed as I fought to get my book Afropean off the ground. Forget New Year’s resolutions, and start fighting for what you believe in now! Have a great 2023 everyone!
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Can’t tell you how grateful I am, not just for the prize, but for the sustained effort by the Jhalak team to promote the work of all the longlistees. Special thanks to my agent
@sprungsultan
, editor Cecilia Stein, and the core Afropean team
@AfropeanGeek
@natillumine
&
@cnina86
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My two daughters. Same parents, different flavours. Genes are mad!
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Just finished final recording for the Afropean Podcast series feat. Gloria Wekker, Olivette Otele, Les Nubians, Stephen Simmonds, Joy Denalane, Zap Mama, Kalaf Epalanga & more. Crafted beautifully by
@Femiaow1
it is as much a soundscape as a Podcast. Can’t wait to share!
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Three years since the hardback of Afropean was released. Holding my book for the first time was a strange experience. On the one hand I was sort of in awe of it- couldn’t believe it was real. On the other hand It was humbling. All that hard work just for a little rectangle!
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I think in terms of design, and the respect paid to the photographs, the Italian of Afropean is possibly my favourite edition yet! Available from EDT
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Proud to share the news that Afropean has been shortlisted for The Bread and Roses Award!
📢📢📢Announcement! 📢📢📢
The Alliance of Radical Booksellers present
--The 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 for the 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗼𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬--
See thread for the 6 books selected
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“Shots like this, where you have a Black family doing something really banal – you don’t see that usually. Images of Blackness are either super stylised and high fashion on the one hand, or ghettoised on the other…[but] I just found this sort of everydayness.” I/V
@HUCKmagazine
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Just found this PR photo of Dad, just after he left his group The Fantastics (Formerly The Velours) to begin a solo career. The chances of anyone being born are impossibly improbable, but its so strange to think without this phenomenon called Northern Soul I wouldn’t be alive.
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Had a great chat with
@malorieblackman
about YA fiction, the political climate in the 00s, in which she pieced together the first Noughts & Crosses novel (which inspired Stormzy to set up
@MerkyBooks
) and her final novel in the series, Endgame. This Sunday
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On the road, following the coast, making new work about the Black community in Britain. But beneath this work is a deeper dismay at the state of this hollowed out country at large, beyond London. Streets lined with Cash Convertors, betting shops and charity stores. Terrifying.
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Took this yesterday. It’s part of a long term project called ‘Postmodern Ruins’, documenting the decaying 80s/90s Tory/New Labour vision of postindustrial Sheffield. They seemed to think they could simply colour everything in plastic and primary colours and get away with it.
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Out here raising our replacements, trying to build on generations gone, and nurture better generations to come. Happy Father’s Day everyone!
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Been waiting YEARS to walk into Foyles on the Charing Cross Road and see Afropean on the shelves. The book is officially OUT NOW!
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If my book Afropean resonated in any way, do join us
@ICALondon
this Thursday for the U.K. launch of a new magazine I guest curated with
@DahmaniTaous
and
@TheEyesMagazine
dedicated to Black photographers working in Europe. Eddie Otchere DJing, and FREE
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I'd love to write my own version of The Road to Wigan Pier; an on the ground reportage of what 'working class' means in Britain the 21st century. I would imagine it would be quite different to Orwell's book.
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Something that amazes me is how often things really are worth the effort, just in slower and sometimes unexpected ways. You got to your desk & wrote that unpaid essay for that obscure literary mag & 7 years later someone reads it & wants to you to speak in Brazil, or somewhere
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Took me five hours (and original plan was for it to be shaped like a bass clef) but finally put this totally impractical bookshelf up; worth it to display Neda Koochahian Fard’s wonderful
@jhalakprize
sculpture though!
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Just received my beautiful Leipzig Book Prize booklet. Surreal and wonderful to see Afropean join a list that includes works from Ryszard Kapuscinski, Geert Mak, Ian Kershaw and Eric Hobsbawm. What an honour!
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Before publication, I was concerned that the communities I was writing about wouldn’t be reached through usual PR channels. One of a few things I did in attempt to counteract this, was post my own stickers in various ends all over Europe. Here are some of them 3 yes later!
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Got an idea for a TV series that tells the history of council estates- but not from the top down. Would merge archive and architects with emcees & artists who’ve made art in them & everyday people. Skinnyman’s Finsbury Park, So Solid’s Battersea, Dizzee’s Bow, Giggs’ Peckham etc
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In 2021, Afropean won the European Essay Prize, but I couldn’t receive it in person because of Coronavirus. Now not only do I get to visit beautiful Morges, but I get to open up an exhibition of photographs, many of which weren’t included in the book. Go see it if you’re in town!
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Incredible to see these stories from Europe’s Black community taking the stage in European streets. When I was creating the work, with a cheap camera and no publishing deal/funding, I had no idea that it would receive such a spotlight. Very proud and thankful.
The exposition 'Afropean Express: Travels in Black Europe' by
@johnypitts
has just landed in Leipzig and will soon be opened.
Last summer, Afropean was part of the biennial
@CultForum
. Stay tuned for more spin-offs!
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A portrait of Akala I took in 2009 in a now-defunct Vegan restaurant in Camden. He wasn’t quite the phenom then that he is now. I knew some of his music but have to admit that when I asked to take his photograph I didn’t know it was him, I just appreciated his T shirt.
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Just read The Man Who Lived Underground, an unpublished Richard Wright novel abt to be released in the UK. It’s great, but the unpublished essay at the back connecting Blues music to surrealism & Freud is transcendent! I’ll be talking to his daughter Julia about it for Open Book
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Shot Serbia on an old Soviet 'Belomo Vilia' camera I found in a dusty second hand shop in Belgrade
#lomo
#brutalism
http://t.co/je0xrL41WR
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Quite an emotional day visiting Stax Records in Memphis. My Mom and Dad raised me on this music, and in some ways it’s the reason I’m alive- Sheffielders loved the type of music my Dad was making so brought him over from the States, and he met my Mom. Felt like a home from home!
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Working clockwise around the British coast and sure enough fresh stories of Black Britishness are emerging. Cornwall yesterday.
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One day I want to be part of a creative collective that’s so serious we have a photograph like this taken of us.
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Just a reminder that episode one of my new series exploring fallen utopias, ‘The Failure of the Future’ is on
@BBCRadio4
this morning at 11:30.
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My exhibition 'Home is not a Place' (released alongside my book collaboration with
@rrobinson72
), chronicling the every day Black British experience opens at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh on the 9th March. Catch an interview I did about it with Woo/ITV here:
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The
@jhalakprize
is accepting submissions and I urge editors/writers to submit work. I used to be a bit cynical about prizes, but seeing the work
@ProfSunnySingh
,
@nikeshshukla
put in with a small and dedicated team was so inspiring, and really changed everything for me. DO IT!
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My exhibition ‘Home is not a Place’ at Graves Gallery with
@photoworks_uk
is still on until Christmas. It’s free and designed to wrap you up in memories of a working class home. Use it as an amenity, to stay warm, sit and think, meditate, listen to tunes and look at some photos.
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I bought this rare box set of every episode of Eurotrash, and am quietly devastated at how much better it is than I remember. It made me realise I’m part of generation in Britain who were brought up European. As a kid I just watched Eurotrash for laughs (okay, and nudity) 1/2
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I’m hosting Open Book for Radio 4 tomorrow at 4pm. Discussing the legacy of PD James with Harriet Tyce and Dreda Say Mitchell and chatting to Akwaeke Emezi about their groundbreaking new novel They Death of Vivek Oji, among other things.
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Today at 5pm BST I’ll accept the European Essay Prize and be in conversation with Amin Maalouf. Below is a self portrait taken on my way home, passing through Lausanne after 6 months of travelling, wondering if my notes might form a book. So it’s a beautiful bit of synchronicity
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One of the last really close moments I had with my Dad before he passed was going to see Black Panther at the cinema together. He was an actor and fought with glass ceilings for years. We both recognised It was a real moment. And my God did Chadwick Boseman rise to it. RIP
Chadwick Boseman became emotional about trading letters with children with terminal cancer who passed before they got to see Black Panther...
Chadwick was fighting his own battle with cancer at this time. But continued to represent as the super hero children were waiting to see!
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On 5th March the Afropean book is released in paperback! Available to pre-order now: Italian, German and French translations due later this year, and an Afropean Podcast series I'm working on with the brilliant
@reducedlisten
in the works.
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In love with this book of Irish Traveller folktales by
@Oeiny
. I wrote Afropean for the black community first, but as drafts went on I kept imagining a reader who was Chinese American - how could I make her care about my journey? This book reiterates the virtue of reaching out.
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Just conducted an interview where it became apparent to me that 20 years of creativity emerged from a year doing nothing when I was 17. I was what they call in Japan a 'Ronin'; a drifter, unemployed/ out of school. I'd love to get in another year of Ronin before retirement age!
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Thankful for the renewed interest in Afropean, but a little unsettled by a new economy opening up in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Reading my book can’t bring him back. I can only offer a page of it to my fellow black writers, that is helping me navigate this moment.
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Was asked by
@guardianculture
to pick one of my favourite shots, and tell the story behind it. I chose one of my early photographs, which speaks to me of New Labour, black psychic geography and my Grandad...
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My five year old daughter came home from school yesterday saying she wanted “some shoes with a white tick on them”. And so it begins... 😩
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For anyone interested in the picture of my great uncle I mentioned in the piece...
@PenguinUKBooks
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I look at what’s happening in France and I can only think of what Almamy told me on my Afropean journey years ago.
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Bern is beautiful. Spending time here has refreshed my mind. Looking at those mountains is like a mental palate cleanser. I can feel truly new work / ideas emerging for the first time since the pandemic. Such a great place to think.
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Very honoured to announce that Helmut Dierlamm’s German translation of Afropean has won the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding.
Für sein Buch "Afropäisch" (deutsche Übersetzung
@suhrkamp
) erhält
@johnypitts
den Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung 2021:
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Really proud that Afropean has been shortlisted for the Bread & Roses award, aligned with some great bookstores! The winner will be announced Wednesday night! 🤞🏽🤞🏽🤞🏽
Join us this Wednesday evening for thethe Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2020 Online Award Ceremony. A great line up of authors, registration free. Check poster and link for details
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You've been there since day one Bernardine, and I can't thank you enough for all the support and friendship, all the way back to my first ever published work in 2008, which you selected as a juror.
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