Margaret Busby

Through her maternal line, she is a cousin of BBC newscaster Moira Stuart, and her grandfather was Dominica-born George James Christian (1869–1940), a delegate at the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, who migrated to the Gold Coast in 1902.

Her parents sent their three children to be educated in England when Busby was five.

She and her sister first attended a school in the Lake District, followed by Charters Towers School, an international girls' boarding-school in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex.

After passing her O-levels there aged 14, Busby left school at 15, went back to Ghana and took her A-levels at 16, then spent a year at a college in Cambridge so as not to begin university too young.

From the age of 17, she studied English at Bedford College (later merged with Royal Holloway College), London University, where she edited her college literary magazine as well as publishing her own poetry, and graduated with a BA Honours degree at the age of 20.

Dr Busby (1899–1980) was a lifelong friend of Kwame Nkrumah's mentor George Padmore and attended school in Trinidad with C. L. R. James at Queen's Royal College, winning the Island Scholarship, which enabled him to travel to Britain in 1919 to study medicine.

After initial studies at Edinburgh University, George A. Busby transferred to University College, Dublin, to complete his medical qualifications, and then practised as a doctor in Walthamstow, East London (where there is a blue plaque in his honour), before relocating to settle in the Gold Coast in 1929.

She was married to British jazz musician and educator Lionel Grigson (1942–1994).

While still at university she met her future business partner Clive Allison at a party in Bayswater Road, and they decided to start a publishing company.

Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK.

She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby (A & B) in the 1960s.

Margaret Yvonne Busby was born in 1944, in Accra, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), to Dr George Busby and Mrs Sarah Busby (née Christian), who both had family links to the Caribbean, particularly to Trinidad, Barbados and Dominica.

Busby has regularly worked for radio and television since the late 1960s, when she presented the magazine programme London Line for the Central Office of Information, as well as Break For Women on the BBC African Service, and later Talking Africa on Spectrum Radio, in addition to appearing on a range of programmes including Kaleidoscope, Front Row, Open Book, Woman's Hour, and Democracy Now! (USA).

Her abridgements and dramatisations for BBC Radio include books by C. L. R. James, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Timothy Mo, Sam Selvon, Walter Mosley, Henry Louis Gates, Lawrence Scott and Simi Bedford.

After graduating, Busby briefly worked at the Cresset Press – part of the Barrie Group – while setting up Allison and Busby (A & B), whose first books were published in 1967, making her the then youngest publisher as well as the first African woman book publisher in the UK – an achievement she has assessed by saying: "[I]t is easy enough to be the first, we can each try something and be the first woman or the first African woman to do X, Y or Z. But, if it's something worthwhile you don't want to be the only. ...I hope that I can, in any way, inspire someone to do what I have done but learn from my mistakes and do better than I have done."

She was Allison & Busby's Editorial Director for 20 years, publishing many notable authors including Sam Greenlee (author of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the first novel published by A & B, in 1969), C. L. R. James, Buchi Emecheta, Chester Himes, George Lamming, Roy Heath, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Nuruddin Farah, Rosa Guy, Val Wilmer, Colin MacInnes, H. Rap Brown, Julius Lester, Geoffrey Grigson, Edward Blishen, Dermot Healy, Adrian Mitchell, Matthew Sweeney, Jill Murphy, Christine Qunta, Michael Horovitz, Alexandra Kollontai, Gordon Williams, Alan Burns, Carlos Moore, Michèle Roberts, Molefe Pheto, Arthur Maimane, Maurice Nyagumbo, Giles Gordon, Claire Rayner, Clive Sinclair, Mineke Schipper, Chris Searle, Richard Stark, James Ellroy, Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Thomson Davis, B. Traven, Alexis Lykiard, Tom Mallin, Jack Trevor Story, Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, John Clute, Julian Savarin, Ralph de Boissière, Andrew Salkey, Harriet E. Wilson, and Miyamoto Musashi.

Busby was a member of Penumbra Productions, an independent production company, with other members including Horace Ové, H. O. Nazareth, Farrukh Dhondy, Mustapha Matura, Michael Abbensetts and Lindsay Barrett, among whose projects was a series of films based on lectures by C. L. R. James in the 1980s.

With Darcus Howe, Busby co-edited C.L.R. James's 80th Birthday Lectures (Race Today Publications, 1984), and she is co-editor with Beverley Mason FRSA of No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, a 2018 publication arising out of the 2015–16 exhibition No Colour Bar held at the Guildhall Art Gallery.

The 2023 volume Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience, edited by Onyekachi Wambu, includes a Preface by Busby, as does Blazing Trails (2023) by Gus John.

Busby was subsequently editorial director of Earthscan (publishing titles by Han Suyin, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, René Dumont, Carolina Maria de Jesus, and others), before pursuing a freelance career as an editor, writer, and critic, since the early 1990s.

As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian (mainly book reviews or obituaries of artists and activists including Jessica Huntley, Buzz Johnson, Jayne Cortez, Jan Carew, Rosa Guy, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Florynce Kennedy, Barry Reckord, Frank Crichlow, Connie Mark, Glenn Thompson, August Wilson, Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, Geraldine Connor, Binyavanga Wainaina, Bell hooks and Biyi Bandele), The Observer, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the New Statesman, and elsewhere, for both the general press and specialist journals.

In October 2023, it was announced that Hamish Hamilton would be publishing a volume of Busby's collected writings in a year's time.

Busby has contributed to books including Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa (eds Sarah LeFanu and Stephen Hayward, 1990), Mothers: Reflections by Daughters (ed. Joanna Goldsworthy, 1995), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (eds Kadija Sesay and Courttia Newland, 2000), ''Why 2K?

She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa.

She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.

Busby compiled Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (London: Cape, 1992), described by Black Enterprise as "a landmark", which includes contributions in a range of genres by more than 200 women.

Widely reviewed on publication, it is now characterised as containing work by "the matriarchs of African literature. They pioneered 'African' writing, in which they were not simply writing stories about their families, communities and countries, but they were also writing themselves into the African literary history and African historiography. They claimed space for women storytellers in the written form, and in some sense reclaimed the woman's role as the creator and carrier of many African societies' narratives, considering that the traditional storytelling session was a women's domain."

Among other books for which she has written introductions or forewords are the Penguin Modern Classics edition of A Question of Power by Bessie Head, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta (ed. Marie Umeh, 1996), Beyond Words: South African Poetics (with Keorapetse Kgositsile, Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, 2009), and To Sweeten Bitter (2017) by Raymond Antrobus.

Busby's play based on C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley, and produced by Pam Fraser Solomon, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1998, winning a Commission for Racial Equality "Race in the Media Award" (RIMA) in 1999.

Anthology for a New Era (2000), The Legacy of Efua Sutherland (2007), Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70 (2012), 99 words (ed. Liz Gray, 2011), Black British Perspectives: A Series of Conversations on Black Art Forms (ed. Kadija Sesay, 2011), James Barnor: Ever Young (2015), If I Could Tell You Just One Thing...: Encounters with Remarkable People and Their Most Valuable Advice (by Richard Reed, 2016), Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible (by Elizabeth Uviebinené and Yomi Adegoke, 2018), and Chris Fite-Wassilak's The Artist in Time'' (July 2020).

In October 2003, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour broadcast Busby's five-part serial Yaa Asantewaa, also directed by Fraser Solomon.

In 2014, Busby co-authored with Ishmahil Blagrove Carnival: A Photographic and Testimonial History of the Notting Hill Carnival.

Busby edited a 2019 follow-up volume entitled New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (first published by Myriad Editions in the UK), featuring another 200-plus writers from across the African diaspora.

A reviewer in The Irish Times commented: "Sometimes you need an anthology to remind you of the variety, strength and nuance of writing among a certain region or group of people. New Daughters of Africa is indispensable because African voices have been silenced or diminished throughout history, and women's voices even more so."

Connected with the 2019 anthology, the "Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award" was announced by the publisher, in partnership with SOAS, University of London, to benefit an African woman student, covering tuition fees and accommodation at International Students House, London.

Busby was a prominent participant in the major 2019 exhibition Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers at Somerset House, and contributed an introductory essay for the catalogue, as well as participating in events there.

In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons".

In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.

The first recipient of the award was Kenyan student Idza Luhumyo, who began her course in autumn 2020, and went on to win the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing.