Margaret Busby

Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and literary critic, as well as a global cultural figure. She was born in Ghana and educated in the United Kingdom, graduating from London University.

Busby became Britain’s youngest and first Black woman publisher when she cofounded Allison & Busby in the late 1960s and published notable authors, including Buchi Emecheta, Nuruddin Farah, Rosa Guy, C. L. R. James, Michael Moorcock, and Jill Murphy. She compiled Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent (Pantheon Books, 1992) and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (HarperCollins). Her own collected writings will be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2025.

Busby has also written drama for BBC radio and the stage. Her radio abridgments and dramatizations encompass work by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Timothy Mo, Walter Mosley, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, and Wole Soyinka. She has interviewed high-profile writers, among them Toni Morrison and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and served on the boards of such organisations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine, Tomorrow’s Warriors, and the Africa Centre in London.

A long-time campaigner for diversity in publishing, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of several honorary doctorates and awards, including the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal, the Royal African Society’s inaugural Africa Writes Lifetime Achievement Award, and the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.