Colin Grant

** A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week** **A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year** 'Hopeful and angry, joyful and tear-jerking' Grazia 'An extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph 'Prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details' Observer 'Oral history at its finest' Daily Mail Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives. Homecoming is an unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of our history.

Voices of the Windrush Generation

Homecoming

New in paperback, this groundbreaking biography captures the full sweep and epic dimensions of Marcus Garvey's life, the dazzling triumphs and the dreary exile. As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy given to elaborate public displays. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and fired the imagination of his followers. Negro With a Hat restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century."A searching, vivid, and (as the title suggests) complex account of Garvey's short but consequential life."--Steve Hahn, The New Republic"The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early '20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant.... Grant's book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. It is also an engrossing social history.... Negro With a Hat is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated."--New York Times Book Review"Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s 'Back to Africa' movement.... Grant's learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page. A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)"This splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"Grant's strength lies in his ability to re-create political moods and offer compelling sketches of colorful individuals and their organizations.... An engaging and readable introduction to a complicated and contentious historical actor who, in his time, possessed a unique capacity to inspire devotion and hatred, adulation and fear."--Chicago Tribune"A monumental, nuanced and broadly sympathetic portrait."--Financial Times

The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

Negro with a Hat:The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

'[A] brilliant, tender book... An extraordinary work of love and art, which left me choked with tears.' Maggie Gee, Observer A Sunday Times Book of the Year One day Colin Grant's teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed with epilepsy. A Smell of Burning tells the remarkable story of this strange and misunderstood disorder. How certain people, at a particular moment in their life, start to suffer seizures, often preceded by an aura, of which a smell of burning is one of the most common. For many years epilepsy was associated with mental illness or even possession by devils. People with epilepsy were forbidden to marry or have children. Many became victims of Nazi eugenics programmes. To this day many people with epilepsy - sixty million worldwide - still live in fear of exposure. Grant's book traces the history of the condition and the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works. He tells the stories of famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vincent Van Gogh, and through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

The Story of Epilepsy

A Smell of Burning

In this memoir Colin Grant looks at his father through the eyes of his ten-year old self.

A 1970s Childhood in Suburbia

Bageye at the Wheel

Emma Dyer

The arrival of HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Essex in 1948 was turned into a significant event by the British media but it is only one small part of a bigger story. Windrush looks at the movement of people after the Second World War in Britain. In an accessible and child-friendly way, the book explores the treatment of Black people, the struggles they faced and those they continue to face as well as celebrating the legacy of the Windrush generation in modern Britain. You can build your own encyclopedia with A Ladybird Book. Other titles available in this series: The Ancient Egyptians Animal Habitats Baby Animals British Kings and Queens Climate Change Electricity The Human Body Insects and Minibeasts Mountains Planet Earth Rainforests Rivers The Romans Sea Creatures The Solar System The Stone Age Trains Trees Volcanoes Weather

A Ladybird Book: Windrush

One day Colin Grant's teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed with epilepsy. A Smell of Burning tells the remarkable story of this strange and misunderstood disorder. How certain people, at a particular moment in their life, start to suffer seizures, often preceded by an aura, of which a smell of burning is one of the most common. For many years epilepsy was associated with mental illness or even possession by devils. People with epilepsy were forbidden to marry or have children. Many became victims of Nazi eugenics programmes. To this day many people with epilepsy - sixty million worldwide - still live in fear of exposure. Grant's book traces the history of the condition and the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works. He tells the stories of famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vincent Van Gogh, and through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

One day Colin Grant’s teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed with epilepsy. In A Smell of Burning Colin Grant tells the remarkable story of this strange and misunderstood disorder. He shows us the famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc and Vincent van Gogh, the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works, and, through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

Theodore Levitt's Marketing Myopia

"A natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read." Bernardine Evaristo 'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a maverick and small-time ganja dealer with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of the black British experience. Written with the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'm Black So You Doin't Have to Be is an unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.

A Memoir in Eight Lives

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be

The definitive group biography of the Wailers—Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston—chronicling their rise to fame and power. Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers—one of the most influential groups in popular music. Colin Grant presents a lively history of this remarkable band from their upbringing in the brutal slums of Kingston to their first recordings and then international superstardom. With energetic prose and stunning, original research, Grant argues that these reggae stars offered three models for black men in the second half of the twentieth century: accommodate and succeed (Marley), fight and die (Tosh), or retreat and live (Livingston). Grant meets with Rastafarian elders, Obeah men (witch doctors), and other folk authorities as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of Jamaica's famously impenetrable culture. Much more than a top-flight music biography, The Natural Mystics offers a sophisticated understanding of Jamaican politics, heritage, race, and religion—a portrait of a seminal group during a period of exuberant cultural evolution.

The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer

Colin Grant challenges the popular use of 'myth' as a dismissive designation for the superstitions and falsehoods of 'other' cultures. He argues that 'myths' are not merely archaic relics of a simpler bygone era, irrelevant to the technically sophisticated consumer of contemporary Western culture, but an integral and living part of our daily lives. The author maintains that myths occupy a place in our present-day lives that is every bit as important to us as the divinities and heroes of classical antiquity were to the ancients. Grant explores some of the 'living myths' that shape our everyday lives - science, sports, sex, consumerism, societal values, ecology, and religion - and maintains that many of these myths serve as religious substitutes in a secular age. The myths themselves are in a constant state of flux and transformation. They ebb and flow, both with in the context of wider culture and individual experience.

Myths We Live by

A powerful prescient memoir of life in 1970s Britain for a child of Windrush generation parents. 'This book is a classic' Sunday Telegraph To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather there: Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not settle for anything less. This is the story of a father seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old son. It’s a wry and gentle comedy about unfulfilling day jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale drug-dealing. And it is also about a family struggling to belong in post-Windrush Britain and growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia. LOOK OUT FOR COLIN GRANT'S NEW BOOK: Homecoming - the first oral history of the Windrush generation

The history of the original Wailers -- Tosh, Livingstone and Marley -- as never before told. Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers -- one of the most influential groups in popular music. One of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines for the first time the story of the Wailers. It charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, illuminating why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, Colin Grant travels in search of the last surviving Wailer.

The Natural Mystics : Marley, Tosh and Wailer

I & I

Umi Sinha

Ever heard 'Black people don't go camping' or 'Black people don't eat pasta?' This new Writing Our Legacy anthology aims to debunk outdated but still current stereotypes of Black people through a reimagining of the Sussex landscape from the Black, Asian and minority ethnic perspective. Twenty-three contributors from across East Sussex, West Sussex and Brighton tell their own stories and narratives. The anthology tells stories of many firsts - first trip to Afro-Caribbean hairdressers, first sexual awakenings, first visit to the Chattri Memorial. The writing also deals with middles and ends - raising children, solitary pursuits, and the deaths of friends and family. We are transported to local places of interest such as Cuckmere Haven and Brighton Pavilion, and also elsewhere - to Pakistan, India, Iran. Some authors deal with pressing issues of contemporary Britain, including Brexit and the Windrush scandal, while others cast their eye over history and the natural environment. Contributors are: Georgina Aboud, Jenny Arach, Sheila Auguste, Alinah Azadeh, Priti Barua, Bebb Burchell, Josef Cabey, Suchi Chatterjee, Lisa Climie, Joyoti Grech Cato, Sally-Claire Fadelle, Josephine Hall, Jasmine Harris, Maggie Harris, L Oluwafemi Hughes Jonas, Farah Edwards Khan, Dulani Kulasinghe, Georgina Parke, Annie Richardson, Zaid S Sethi, Hayat Nezameddin Shehab, Sonny Singh and Nina Thaddeus. Editors: Umi Sinha, Colin Grant, Dean Atta Publisher: Writing Our Legacy

Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry from the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Experience

Hidden Sussex, a New Anthology for Sussex

Examines the life of the black leader who started the Back-to-Africa movement in the United States, believing blacks would never receive justice in countries with a white majority.

Colin Grant

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