the quiet american is a book by which british writer

Political attitudes have changed, but sales have taken a long time to catch up. This series has been an exciting opportunity for us to feel we’re being heard again.Īnd yes, let’s pick up on that point about the market. Most of us were published by small independent houses that couldn’t really sustain the kind of impetus that books need to be disseminated more widely. So it was very hard at that time to get published and be heard. They would publish African writing and Caribbean writing, but not British writing. In the early nineties, I went to a Black writers’ conference, and someone from a major publishing house said that as a policy they didn’t publish Black British writing, because there wasn’t a market for it. The agenda behind this series, created by Bernardine Evaristo, is to rediscover novels that perhaps didn’t get much of a reading first time around, for all sorts of reasons. It was first published twenty years ago, so it was in the past, really-then suddenly I was getting the opportunity to be heard again. It’s been really exciting for me, because it came absolutely out of the blue. This has been billed as “a rediscovery of lost or hard-to-find books.”

Your own novel The Fat Lady Sings has just been republished as part of the Black Britain: Writing Back series. So I thought it was a really courageous novel, and one that was long overdue. I think Black writers are a bit reluctant to talk about trauma within the family-there’s a sense that that’s one stereotype that’s worked against us for so long, that Black families are dysfunctional in some way.

That also applies to Judith Bryan’s novel, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey, because it addresses trauma. Again, a relatively new writer compared to David Dabydeen and Bernardine Evaristo, but she has a really fresh voice, and she’s looking at areas that I think we need to be talking about more in Black communities. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

The quiet american is a book by which british writer