‘We don’t celebrate black creativity enough’: Why the British Black Book Festival is bigger than ever | books

HeyOn Sunday morning, the expansive concrete foyer of the Barbican Hotel will replace its usual tranquility with a buzz of conversation, excitement, and a certain kind of cultural energy: black British storytelling in all its multiplicity.

Now, in its fifth year, the Black British Book Festival (BBBF) is Europe’s largest celebration of black literature. What started as a small, intimate gathering has evolved into a national institution attracting thousands of attendees and some of the biggest names in publishing.

The festival, which was founded by Selena Brown in 2021, grew out of the children’s author’s frustration when she was told her book wouldn’t sell because there was a black girl on the cover. Determined to create a space she couldn’t find anywhere else, Brown launched the inaugural event as a one-day festival. Five years later, it has expanded into a year-round cultural platform, hosting three major festivals across the UK, opening bookshops, collaborating with Glastonbury, and launching a Sir Lenny Henry-themed children’s book festival.

“Black British literature has always been rich, but too often it has not been given the platform or investment it deserves,” says Brown. “The festival exists to change that.”

This year’s main event line-up at the Barbican includes Dennis Lewis, Marcus Ryder, Jordan Stevens and John Sarpong. The 36-event program covers everything from political conversations to children’s storytelling, plus panel discussions with major Black authors and workshops for aspiring writers. There are talks on Malcolm X, sessions on publishing, and spaces where writers and readers can meet each other.

“It’s an absolute celebration of black thinking,” Ryder says. Charity director and co-founder of the Sir Lenny Henry Center for Media Diversity, who will be attending the festival to discuss his book and Henry’s new book on reparations, The Big Payback. “We don’t celebrate the joy of Black creativity enough.”

“The black British experience is unique in that you are constantly fighting a perceived idea of ​​what Britishness is and how we fit into it,” adds Stevens, who is best known for being one half of the Rizzle Kicks, which also hosts an event at the festival. “So when you’re around people who were all in that fight, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s really nice. “It’s a great vibe.” It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, a weird episode.”

But if the BBBF is thriving, the same can’t necessarily be said about the publishing scene surrounding it. The post-2020 boom sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement now feels like a boom rather than a transformation.

The UK saw a 56% rise in book sales by writers of color in the financial year to 2021. Titles such as Rene Eddo-Lodge’s Why I Don’t Talk to White People About Race Anymore, published in 2017, topped the UK non-fiction list, making Eddo-Lodge the first black British author to hold that position. Publishing houses raced to replicate the formula.

But the momentum did not last. Earlier this year, prominent black literary figures told The Guardian that UK publishing is now less accessible to black authors than it was five years ago. A 2023 analysis by Bookseller found that the post-2020 boom “failed to deliver the promised expansion in publishing output.” And just last week, a literacy charity reported a “catastrophic decline” in the number of children’s books featuring black main characters, a drop of more than a fifth between 2023 and 2024.

“It can be soul-destroying to look at the ebb and flow of a system that is not necessarily based on integrity and authenticity,” says Stevens. “It’s about what’s hot.”

For Ryder, the problem is no mystery. “The financial model of publishing is broken,” he says. “Everyone wonders why I don’t talk to white people about race anymore, but the truth is that when it was published, it fell and died, even the killing of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. We clearly have a model that does not favor what is now recognized as great black literature.”

“It seems like two opposite things are happening at the same time,” he adds. “The festival is growing very quickly. At the same time, a lot of black literature seems to be shrinking. What that tells me is that there is a tremendous need and desire for community among people who enjoy black literature. What we need to do is build on that community.”

He’s not talking about the quality of the work, but rather the structure of the industry that still treats him as a specialist. “If we believe that literature is the cornerstone of our democracy — and it is, because it spreads thought and spreads it through society — then we need to think about whether government funding for underrepresented groups is needed,” he says. “Literature is very important to society, and relying solely on the profit motive to ensure its success is not the right way forward.”

For Ryder, this is what makes BBBF essential: it exists outside of that model, and does not wait for publishing houses to decide that black writing is marketable. “More often than not, we respond to other people’s agendas,” he says. “While the wonderful thing about this festival is that the agenda is defined by Black people. It is the narratives that are defined by Black people. You rarely get spaces and opportunities to see that.”

At a moment of heightened political tension and cultural division in the United Kingdom, the festival has become more acutely resonant. This summer has seen race riots and far-right marches erupt in towns and cities across England. Reform in the UK has risen in the polls and St George’s flags have been painted on the pavements. A new cultural consensus—anti-DEI, anti-immigrant, and “anti-woke”—is being loudly asserted in public.

While Ryder acknowledges that the festival provides a counterweight to this hostile political climate, he resists framing it this way: “I don’t want our actions to be dictated as just a response to white people’s fears and interests. What I want is for us to set an agenda for what we need as black people.”

“This energy has been there in Britain all my life – my father grew up with the National Front, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and he would get beaten up in the street,” Stevens adds. “That’s the imperial nature of Britain. So, right now, with everything that’s going on, it’s good to remind ourselves that black people are doing dope work.”

However, Stevens is clear-eyed about the limitations on representation in the UK. “Everything black gets pushed into October and then people move on,” he says. The October effect—the surge of interest during Black History Month followed by silence—is something many writers know well.

With this in mind, BBBF can serve as an affirmation of cultural permanence, when blackness can sometimes be treated as fleeting or conditional. Ryder points out that the sense of community building echoes the cultural renaissance of the past. “There is an untapped desire for a black British community of creatives and thinkers,” he says. “If we look at history – the Harlem Renaissance – these writers were not working in isolation. They were coming together, forming a community. And once you have that community, other things will flow from it. Literature will flow from it, great thinking will flow from it, great art will flow from it.”