1 November 2021
Think "classic literature" and plenty of white authors probably spring to mind: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Woolf, Fitzgerald. Harper Lee, who wrote about race, is a favourite of many - but Black authors themselves are vastly under-represented. Students might get the chance to study Toni Morrison or James Baldwin, but what about the rest of Black literature's vast history? Reports last year revealed that it was possible for pupils to complete their GCSEs and leave school without having studied a single novel or play by a non-white author. Only in 2019 did the UK's most prestigious award for fiction, the Booker prize, first go to a Black British author: Bernardine Evaristo (who shared it).
