Creative Manchester present
In conversation with David Olusoga OBE and Gary Younge
In conversation with Jeffrey Boakye and Ellah Wakatama OBE
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David Olusoga OBE is an award-winning British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and film-maker. One of the UK’s foremost and respected historians — ranked amongst the most influential Black Britons of our time, David Olusoga is Professor of Public History at The University of Manchester. A regular contributor to the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman and BBC History Magazine, his books include Black and British, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the Longman-History Today Trustees Award, The Kaiser’s Holocaust and The World’s War. His television credits include Civilisations, Black and British, Our NHS: A Hidden History, A House Through Time and the BAFTA award-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. David Olusoga was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to history and community integration, and received a special BAFTA award in May 2023 for outstanding contribution to television.
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at The University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media. He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. He has also written for The New York Review of Books. Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.
Jeffrey Boakye is an author, broadcaster and educator with a particular interest in issues surrounding race, masculinity, education and popular culture. Jeffrey taught English to 11- to 18-year-olds for 15 years and now provides training for schools, universities and businesses on race, identity, masculinity and education. He is also Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Institute for Education.
Jeffrey’s published books are: Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime, Black Listed: Black British Culture Explored, What is Masculinity? Why Does it Matter? And Other Big Questions (co-authored), Musical Truth: A Musical Journey through Modern Black Britain (winner of the Quiz Writers’ Choice Secondary Non–Fiction Award) and I Heard What You Said. Jeffrey co-hosts BBC Radio 4’s double award winning Add to Playlist. He received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leicester in January 2023.
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, OBE is Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books and Chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of The Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 Dublin International Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and assistant editor at Penguin. She is a trustee of The Royal Literary Fund, and in 2011 she was awarded an OBE for services to the publishing industry.
