Stella Dadzie, writer and activist, is best known for her co-authorship of The Heart of the Race: Black Women's lives in Britain which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature. She is a founder member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent), a national umbrella group that emerged in the late 1970s as part of the British Civil Rights movement, and was recently described as one of the "grandmothers" of Black Feminism in the UK. Her career as a teacher, writer, artist and education activist spans over 40 years. She previously worked with editor Cheryl Robson on 'Hairvolution: Her Hair, Her Story, Our History'.Kadija George Sesay, co-editor, MBE, Hon. FRSL is a British literary activist, short story writer and poet of Sierra Leonean descent, and the publisher and managing editor of the magazine SABLE LitMag. Her work has earned her many awards and nominations, including the Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement in 1994, Candace Woman of Achievement in 1996, The Voice Community Award in Literature in 1999 and the Millennium Woman of the Year in 2000. She is the General Secretary for African Writers Abroad (PEN International) and organises the Writers' HotSpot - trips for writers abroad, where she teaches creative writing and journalism courses.Sesay has edited or co-edited several books, including Burning Words, Flaming Images: Poems and Short Stories by Writers of African Descent (1996), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (with Courttia Newland, 2000),[5][6] Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2005), and (as Kadija George) Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (Aurora Metro Books, 2005), Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature (Hansib Publications, 2005). In 2007, she created the first SABLE Literary Festival in The Gambia, where she now programmes the Mboka literary festival and bookfair, which she co-founded in 2016.Sesay's first full collection of poems, entitled Irki, was published in 2013. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in a range of publications, including the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. In 2021, with Joan Anim-Addo and Deirdre Osborne she curated This is The Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books highlighting alternatives by people of African or Asian descent and indigenous peoples.
