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 Sam Greenlee, James Ellroy, Michèle Roberts, Roy Heath, Michael Horowitz, Buchi Emecheta, Chester Himes, Hunter S. Thompson, George Lamming, Michelangelo, and Jill Murphy.

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.

Margaret Busby is also the editor of Firespitter; the Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez. She has written numerous dramatizations and radio abridgements of books by, among others, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Walter Mosely, and Henry Louis Gates. She has saved writers such as CLR James and George Lamming from obscurity by reprinting their work and introducing them to new readers. She was a founding member of Greater Access to Publishing (GAP), which campaigned for greater diversity in the publishing industry. Her reviews and obituaries for the Guardian and other newspapers and magazines have celebrated the lives and work of many international personalities.

She is 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 2025.

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Photo of Margaret Busby © Luke Daniels