About Colin

Colin Grant is an author of six books. They include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016.

As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word.

Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing and a division of the Royal Literary Fund. He also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, TLS, London Review of Books, Granta and New York Review of Books.

Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC radio 4 Book of the Week and a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019. His latest memoir, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be is published by Jonathan Cape on 26 January 2023.