To celebrate Black History Month our very own Head of English Rachael Gilmour has chosen 31 books which should be on your reading list.
- CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)
- Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (2006)
- Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984)
- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
- Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984)
- Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013)
- Yrsa Daley-Ward, Bone (2017)
- Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004)
- Bernardine Evaristo, Mr Loverman (2014)
- Pauline Black, Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir (2012)
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2018)
- Diana Evans, Ordinary People (2018)
- Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth (2011)
- Akala, Natives (2018)
- Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené, Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible (2018)
- Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1954)
- Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (1991)
- David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2015)
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)
- Anthony Joseph, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018)
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
- Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987)
- Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
- Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems (2017)
- Alex Wheatle, East of Acre Lane (2006)
- Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love (2011)
- David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)
- Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race (2017)