Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) is a major cultural figure around the world.
Her career spans work as a publisher, editor, interviewer, reviewer, scriptwriter, lyricist, radio and TV presenter, activist and mentor. She was appointed President of English PEN in 2023.
Her latest book is Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century.
Margaret Busby became Britain’s then youngest and first Black woman publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby in the 1960s.
As A&B’s editorial director for twenty years, she published an international list of more than 300 notable authors – including Buchi Emecheta, Nuruddin Farah, Sam Greenlee, Rosa Guy, Michael Horowitz, Chester Himes, Adrian Mitchell, Michael Moorcock, Jill Murphy, Hunter S. Thompson, and Val Wilmer – and saved writers such as C.L.R. James and George Lamming from obscurity by reprinting their work and introducing them to new readers.
She has edited two ground-breaking anthologies that together champion the work of more than 400 women of African descent over several centuries: the publication of Daughters of Africa (1992) changed the literary landscape; its sequel, New Daughters of Africa (2019), seeded and launched the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award, which annually funds a woman student from Africa to study at SOAS, University of London. She is also the editor of Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez.
Margaret has written numerous radio abridgements and dramatisations, encompassing work by Henry Louis Gates, Timothy Mo, Walter Mosley, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, and Wole Soyinka. Her reviews and obituaries for the Guardian and other newspapers and magazines have celebrated the lives and work of many international personalities.
She has judged prestigious literary prizes, including the Booker, and served on the boards of such organisations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine and the Africa Centre in London. She is a patron of Tomorrow's Warriors and Friends of the Huntley Archives at London Metropolitan Archives (FHALMA).
A long-time campaigner for diversity in publishing, and a founding member of Greater Access to Publishing (GAP), she is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a patron of the Black British Book Festival and a Prize Ambassador for the SI Leeds Literary Prize. She has received multiple honorary doctorates and awards for her contribution to literature, including the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal, and the Royal African Society’s inaugural Africa Writes Lifetime Achievement Award.
Listen to Margaret Busby on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions.