Margaret Busby
Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest publisher as well as the first black female book publisher in the UK when she and Clive Allison co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa, and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020, she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.
Education and early years
Margaret Yvonne Busby was born in 1944, in Accra, Gold Coast. Her parents were Dr George Busby and Mrs Sarah Busby, who both had family links to the Caribbean, particularly to Trinidad, Barbados and Dominica. Her Barbados-born father, Dr Busby was a lifelong friend of Kwame Nkrumah's mentor George Padmore and attended school in Trinidad with C. L. R. James at Queen's Royal College, winning the Island Scholarship. This, in turn, enabled him to travel to Britain to study medicine, in 1919. After initial studies at Edinburgh University, George Busby transferred to University College, Dublin, to complete his medical qualifications, and then practised as a doctor in Walthamstow, London, before relocating to settle in the Gold Coast in 1929. Through her maternal line, she is a cousin of BBC newscaster Moira Stuart. Her grandfather was Dominica-born George James Christian, a delegate at the First Pan-African Conference, in London, in 1900, who migrated to the Gold Coast in 1902.Her parents sent their three children to be educated in England, when Busby was five. She and her sister first attended a school in the Lake District, followed by Charters Towers School, an international girls' boarding-school in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. After passing her O-levels there, aged 14, Busby left school at 15, went back to Ghana and took her A-levels at 16, then spent a year at a college in Cambridge so as not to begin university too young. From the age of 17, she studied English at Bedford College, London University, where she edited her college literary magazine, as well as publishing her own poetry. She graduated with a BA Honours degree, at the age of 20. She was married to British jazz musician and educator, Lionel Grigson.
Publishing career
While still at university, she met her future business partner, Clive Allison, at a party in Bayswater Road, and they decided to start a publishing company. After graduating, Busby briefly worked at the Cresset Press – part of the Barrie Group – while setting up Allison and Busby, whose first books were published in 1967, making her the then youngest publisher as well as the first African woman book publisher in the UK – an achievement she has assessed by saying: "t is easy enough to be the first, we can each try something and be the first woman or the first African woman to do X, Y or Z. But, if it's something worthwhile you don't want to be the only....I hope that I can, in any way, inspire someone to do what I have done but learn from my mistakes and do better than I have done."She was Allison & Busby's Editorial Director for 20 years, publishing many notable authors including Sam Greenlee, C. L. R. James, Buchi Emecheta, Chester Himes, George Lamming, Roy Heath, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Nuruddin Farah, Rosa Guy, Val Wilmer, Colin MacInnes, H. Rap Brown, Julius Lester, Geoffrey Grigson, Edward Blishen, Dermot Healy, Adrian Mitchell, Matthew Sweeney, Jill Murphy, Christine Qunta, Michael Horovitz, Alexandra Kollontai, Gordon Williams, Alan Burns, Carlos Moore, Michèle Roberts, Molefe Pheto, Arthur Maimane, Maurice Nyagumbo, Giles Gordon, Claire Rayner, Clive Sinclair, Mineke Schipper, Chris Searle, Richard Stark, James Ellroy, Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Thomson Davis, B. Traven, Alexis Lykiard, Tom Mallin, Jack Trevor Story, Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, John Clute, Julian Savarin, Ralph de Boissière, Andrew Salkey, Harriet E. Wilson, and Miyamoto Musashi.
Busby was subsequently editorial director of Earthscan, before pursuing a freelance career as an editor, writer, and critic, from the early 1990s.
Writing, editing and broadcasting
As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the New Statesman, and elsewhere, for both the general press and specialist journals.Hamish Hamilton will publish a collection of Busby's collected writings, titled Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century, in 2026.
''Daughters of Africa'' (1992) and ''New Daughters of Africa'' (2019)
Busby compiled Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present, described by Black Enterprise as "a landmark", which includes contributions in a range of genres by more than 200 women. Widely reviewed on publication, it is now characterised as containing work by "the matriarchs of African literature. They pioneered 'African' writing, in which they were not simply writing stories about their families, communities and countries, but they were also writing themselves into the African literary history and African historiography. They claimed space for women storytellers in the written form, and in some sense reclaimed the woman's role as the creator and carrier of many African societies' narratives, considering that the traditional storytelling session was a women's domain."Busby edited a 2019 follow-up volume entitled New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, featuring another 200-plus writers from across the African diaspora. A reviewer in The Irish Times commented: "Sometimes you need an anthology to remind you of the variety, strength and nuance of writing among a certain region or group of people. New Daughters of Africa is indispensable because African voices have been silenced or diminished throughout history, and women's voices even more so."
Connected with the 2019 anthology, the "Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award" was announced by the publisher, in partnership with SOAS, University of London, to benefit an African woman student, covering tuition fees and accommodation at International Students House, London. The first recipient of the award was Kenyan student Idza Luhumyo, who began her course in autumn 2020, and went on to win the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing.
Other book work
Busby has contributed to books including Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa, Mothers: Reflections by Daughters, IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, Why 2K? Anthology for a New Era, The Legacy of Efua Sutherland, Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70, 99 words, Black British Perspectives: A Series of Conversations on Black Art Forms, James Barnor: Ever Young, If I Could Tell You Just One Thing...: Encounters with Remarkable People and Their Most Valuable Advice, Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible, and Chris Fite-Wassilak's The Artist in Time.In 2014, Busby co-authored with Ishmahil Blagrove Carnival: A Photographic and Testimonial History of the Notting Hill Carnival. Among other books for which she has written introductions or forewords are the Penguin Modern Classics edition of A Question of Power by Bessie Head, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, Beyond Words: South African Poetics, and To Sweeten Bitter by Raymond Antrobus. With Darcus Howe, Busby co-edited C.L.R. James's 80th Birthday Lectures, and she is co-editor with Beverley Mason FRSA of No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, a 2018 publication arising out of the 2015–16 exhibition No Colour Bar held at the Guildhall Art Gallery. The 2023 volume Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience, edited by Onyekachi Wambu, includes a Preface by Busby, as does Blazing Trails by Gus John.
Busby was a prominent participant in the major 2019 exhibition Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers at Somerset House, and contributed an introductory essay for the catalogue, as well as taking part in associated events. In 2024, she also contributed an introductory essay to the catalogue for the exhibition Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys - Ablade Glover At 90.
Busby is the editor of Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez, for which she wrote an introduction.
Broadcasting and dramatisations
Busby has regularly worked for radio and television since the late 1960s, when she presented the magazine programme London Line for the Central Office of Information, as well as Break For Women on the BBC African Service, and later Talking Africa on Spectrum Radio, in addition to appearing on a range of programmes including Kaleidoscope, Front Row, Open Book, Woman's Hour, and Democracy Now!.Her abridgements and dramatisations for BBC Radio include books by C. L. R. James, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Timothy Mo, Sam Selvon, Walter Mosley, Henry Louis Gates, Lawrence Scott and Simi Bedford. Busby's play based on C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley, and produced by Pam Fraser Solomon, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1998, winning a Commission for Racial Equality "Race in the Media Award" in 1999. In October 2003, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour broadcast Busby's five-part serial Yaa Asantewaa, also directed by Fraser Solomon.
Busby was a member of Penumbra Productions, an independent production company, with other members including Horace Ové, H. O. Nazareth, Farrukh Dhondy, Mustapha Matura, Michael Abbensetts and Lindsay Barrett, among whose projects was a series of films based on lectures by C. L. R. James in the 1980s.
Her writing for the stage includes Sankofa, Yaa Asantewaa – Warrior Queen, directed by Geraldine Connor, and An African Cargo, directed by Felix Cross for Nitrobeat and staged at Greenwich Theatre in 2007, among events marking the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807. Her work as a dramatist has been characterised as "aim to recuperate events and people marginalized by Western historiography, to centre indigenous African performance traditions, and to highlight African heroism and African suffering at the hands of whites."
Busby has also been a song lyricist, acknowledged by singer Norma Winstone.
In 2014, following the death of Maya Angelou, Busby scripted a major tribute entitled Maya Angelou: A Celebration, which took place on 5 October at the Royal Festival Hall during the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival; directed by Paulette Randall, and chaired by Jon Snow and Moira Stuart, the celebration featured contributions from artists including Adjoa Andoh, Angel Coulby, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicola Hughes, Ella Odedina, NITROvox, Roderick Williams and Ayanna Witter-Johnson.
In June 2021, Busby appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, with her choices of music including "7 Seconds" by Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry, David Rudder's "Haiti I Am Sorry", "My Baby Just Cares for Me" by Nina Simone, "On the Sunny Side of the Street" by Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt, "Soweto Blues" by Miriam Makeba and "Visions" by Stevie Wonder.