Announcing the latest addition to OWN IT! Agency: Hakim Adi, historian, author, lecturer, and Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Prof. Hakim Adi is Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester and was the first historian of African heritage to become a professor of history in Britain. In January 2018, he launched the world’s first online Masters by Research (MRes) degree programme on the History of Africa and the African Diaspora. Hakim is also the founder and consultant historian of the Young Historians Project. 

His publications have been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese and include: Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (Africa World Press, 2013), Pan-Africanism: A History (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and, as editor, Black British History: New Perspectives (Zed, 2019) and Black Voices on Britain (Macmillan, 2022).

His latest publication is Africa and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (Allen Lane, 2022)

We could not be more excited to announce that Derek Owusu has been named in Granta’s once-in-a-decade list of Best British Novelists.

Previous writers in this prestigious list have included the likes of Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro. The selection, which took over two years to bring together and focuses on writers towards the start of their careers, was judged by authors Rachel Cusk, Helen Oyeyemi, Tash Aw and Brian Dillon, chaired by outgoing Granta magazine editor Sigrid Rausing, from a longlist compiled by the Granta editorial team.

Luke Neima, deputy editor of Granta, told The Bookseller: “The best thing the list can do is really help a younger writer to embark on their career; I think what the judges wanted was ambitious work, work that shows promise — they were thinking about the potential careers of these authors, not just the work that had been done.”

Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London. His debut novel, That Reminds Me, was the first book of fiction to be published under Stormzy’s #Merky Books imprint and won the Desmond Elliott Prize. His latest novel, Losing the Plot, is published with Canongate and has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2023.

You can read the full Bookseller article here.