Margaret Busby

Margaret Busby (Nana Akua Ackon), CBE, Hon. FRSL, is a publisher, editor, writer, broadcaster, activist and mentor. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, she has judged prestigious literary prizes, including the Booker, and sered on the boards of such organizations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine, Tomorrow’s Warriors, the Africa Centre in London and the Caine Prize. In 2023 she was appointed President of English PEN.

As editorial director of Allison & Busby for twenty years, from the late 1960s, Margaret published an international list of more than three hundred notable authors – among them, Buchi Emecheta, Sam Greenlee, Roy Heath, Chester Himes, Jill Murphy and Val Wilmer – and found new audiences for the likes of C. L. R. James and George Lamming. She is the editor of Jane Cortez’s collected poems, Firespitter, as well as two groundbreaking anthologies, Daughters of Africa (1992) and its sequel, New Daughters of Africa (2019), which seeded the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award to fund young women from Africa to study for a master’s degree in the UK.