Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey

Colin Grant is an author, historian and critic. He has written acclaimed biographies of the Wailers and of Marcus Garvey. Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. His most recent book, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is director of WritersMosaic, a division of the RLF, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

"A brisk and well-researched biography... A splendidly colourful book" Daily Telegraph "Gripping and sympathetic...monumental...Grant writes with the quiet authority of a historian who has done a colossal amount of research... and knows the smells and tastes of this period as if he had lived through it. He is slow to pass judgement, but when he does so, the verdict carries real weight... His history reads like a first-rate novel... Grant's book is a fine and valuable monument to [Garvey's] memory" -- Kevin Jackson New Statesman "Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable" -- Margaret Busby Guardian "In this superb new biography, Colin Grant portrays Garvey as a showman-ideologue [and] is to be congratulated on this scholarly, well-written account" Sunday Telegraph "Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research...Grant meticulously chronicles Garvey's eventful odyssey and sheds light on his revolutionary thinking and formidable public speaking...he shows Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity, his paradoxes" Independent on Sunday