Colin Grant

Colin Grant's six books include Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in 1970s Luton, which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year, and Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He is director of WritersMosaic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In his latest memoir, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be, written as a series of true short stories, Grant conjures his idiosyncratic Caribbean family: his proud mother, Ethlyn, who dreams of escaping their council house; his father, Bageye, whose ganja dealing enables Grant’s private school education; and his acerbic uncle, Castus, who predicts Grant’s four BBC disciplinary hearings and berates his nephew for not being black enough.