Gary Younge: from Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter

Please check ticket info for this event below, incl. information about access.

We are honoured to be launching into the 2023 Radical Book Fair with award-winning author, broadcaster, columnist and editor Gary Younge.

The theme for this year’s Radical Book Fair is Revolutionary Feeling - four days to explore the movement between our inner worlds and the society that shapes them, between personal and collective experience, the individual and the systemic in harm as well as joy. Gary Younge has a gift for capturing that interplay between the personal and the collective.

For the last three decades Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events and with the most significant personalities to impact the black diaspora: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Obama’s victory, entering New Orleans days after hurricane Katrina or interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy.

Younge has witnessed how much change is possible, the power of systems to thwart those aspirations, and now, in his latest book, he compels us to ‘imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it.'

Gary Younge is one of Britain's few true public intellectuals. These essays speak to his characteristic blend of discernment, clarity and humane vision, a tonic for our fighting spirit in wearying times. - Priyamvada Gopal

This event will be chaired by Dr Nicole Gipson.

We are grateful to the Journal of American Studies for collaborating with us on this event as a sponsor and a host.

Our Speaker:

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine, the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media and winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism.

He has written six books: Dispatches From the Diaspora, From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter; Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. He has also written for The New York Review of Books. Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.

*Please note that masks will be required at this event (as with all Lighthouse events).

*Accessibility: All events will be professionally filmed & livestreamed. The Roxy is wheelchair accessible (including toilets) and we'll have provisions for neurodivergent guests including stims, quiet space and colour-coded lanyards.

*Events are £5 or free -we completely understand paying for one or two events and then getting free spots for others. The Radical Book Fair is entirely bookshop run and ticket sales are vital to keeping the fair sustainable and paying all our speakers so all support is heartily welcome!

*Featured books: The book & ticket option will select the most recently published book at any given event, if you’re not sure which book you want or don’t want that featured book, then buy a £5 voucher ticket that can be used for any of the books below.

*If you'd like to help make the book fair accessible to more folks, please consider adding to our pay-it-forward fund HERE.