Margaret Busby

Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) is a major cultural figure around the world. Her career has spanned work as a publisher, editor, interviewer, reviewer, scriptwriter, lyricist, radio and TV presenter, activist and mentor. She has judged prestigious literary prizes, including the Booker, and served on the boards of such organisations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine, Tomorrow’s Warriors, and the Africa Centre in London. She has been a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. In 2023 she was appointed President of English PEN.

She 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 Busby 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.

A long-time campaigner for diversity in publishing, and a founding member of Greater Access to Publishing (GAP), she is the current President of English PEN, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates and awards, 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.

Margaret Busby’s own collected writings, Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in March 2026.

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Photo of Margaret Busby © Luke Daniels