Margaret Busby (Nana Akua Ackon), CBE, Hon. FRSL, is a publisher, editor, writer, broadcaster, activist and mentor. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, she has judged prestigious literary prizes, including the Booker, and served on the boards of such organizations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine, Tomorrow’s Warriors, the Africa Centre in London and the Caine Prize. In 2023 she was appointed President of English PEN.As editorial director of Allison & Busby for twenty years, from the late 1960s, Margaret published an international list of more than three hundred notable authors – among them, Buchi Emecheta, Sam Greenlee, Roy Heath, Chester Himes, Jill Murphy and Val Wilmer – and found new audiences for the likes of C. L. R. James and George Lamming. She is the editor of Jane Cortez’s collected poems, Firespitter, as well as two groundbreaking anthologies, Daughters of Africa (1992) and its sequel, New Daughters of Africa (2019), which seeded the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award to fund young women from Africa to study for a master’s degree in the UK.

Celebrated as Britain's youngest and first Black female publisher, Margaret Busby revolutionised literary London . . . Margaret's writing, like her thinking, is incisive, unflinching, sharply funny and exact . . . In her prose and in person, Margaret neither shows off her expertise nor flaunts her achievements. Her lightness of presence is that of the consummate editor: fully focused and committed while working and thinking outwards. She understands the power of writing that is born out of personal imperative and framed by collective endeavour. She deflects attention and is quick to point out the activity going on around her, and the importance of sharing and passing on what you learn . . . Writing in 1985, she quoted her friend and fellow editor Toni Morrison, but could have been speaking for herself: "What I really want to do . . . is to make it possible for someone else to do the same things." She has and she does and she will

Margaret Busby (Nana Akua Ackon), CBE, Hon. FRSL, is a publisher, editor, writer, broadcaster, activist and mentor. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, she has judged prestigious literary prizes, including the Booker, and served on the boards of such organizations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine, Tomorrow’s Warriors, the Africa Centre in London and the Caine Prize. In 2023 she was appointed President of English PEN.As editorial director of Allison & Busby for twenty years, from the late 1960s, Margaret published an international list of more than three hundred notable authors – among them, Buchi Emecheta, Sam Greenlee, Roy Heath, Chester Himes, Jill Murphy and Val Wilmer – and found new audiences for the likes of C. L. R. James and George Lamming. She is the editor of Jane Cortez’s collected poems, Firespitter, as well as two groundbreaking anthologies, Daughters of Africa (1992) and its sequel, New Daughters of Africa (2019), which seeded the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award to fund young women from Africa to study for a master’s degree in the UK.

Celebrated as Britain's youngest and first Black female publisher, Margaret Busby revolutionised literary London . . . Margaret's writing, like her thinking, is incisive, unflinching, sharply funny and exact . . . In her prose and in person, Margaret neither shows off her expertise nor flaunts her achievements. Her lightness of presence is that of the consummate editor: fully focused and committed while working and thinking outwards. She understands the power of writing that is born out of personal imperative and framed by collective endeavour. She deflects attention and is quick to point out the activity going on around her, and the importance of sharing and passing on what you learn . . . Writing in 1985, she quoted her friend and fellow editor Toni Morrison, but could have been speaking for herself: "What I really want to do . . . is to make it possible for someone else to do the same things." She has and she does and she will

Margaret Busby (Nana Akua Ackon), CBE, Hon. FRSL, is a publisher, editor, writer, broadcaster, activist and mentor. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, she has judged prestigious literary prizes, including the Booker, and served on the boards of such organizations as the Royal Literary Fund, Wasafiri magazine, Tomorrow’s Warriors, the Africa Centre in London and the Caine Prize. In 2023 she was appointed President of English PEN.As editorial director of Allison & Busby for twenty years, from the late 1960s, Margaret published an international list of more than three hundred notable authors – among them, Buchi Emecheta, Sam Greenlee, Roy Heath, Chester Himes, Jill Murphy and Val Wilmer – and found new audiences for the likes of C. L. R. James and George Lamming. She is the editor of Jane Cortez’s collected poems, Firespitter, as well as two groundbreaking anthologies, Daughters of Africa (1992) and its sequel, New Daughters of Africa (2019), which seeded the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award to fund young women from Africa to study for a master’s degree in the UK.

Celebrated as Britain's youngest and first Black female publisher, Margaret Busby revolutionised literary London . . . Margaret's writing, like her thinking, is incisive, unflinching, sharply funny and exact . . . In her prose and in person, Margaret neither shows off her expertise nor flaunts her achievements. Her lightness of presence is that of the consummate editor: fully focused and committed while working and thinking outwards. She understands the power of writing that is born out of personal imperative and framed by collective endeavour. She deflects attention and is quick to point out the activity going on around her, and the importance of sharing and passing on what you learn . . . Writing in 1985, she quoted her friend and fellow editor Toni Morrison, but could have been speaking for herself: "What I really want to do . . . is to make it possible for someone else to do the same things." She has and she does and she will