Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter

Product Information

This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event. It’s not like I go into these situations without a view on Brexit or Trump or immigration, but if you think that you have nothing to learn, that you know why people are doing this, that produces incredibly bad journalism He has enjoyed several prizes for his journalism. In 2017 he received the James Aaronson Career Achievement Award from Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2016 he won the Comment Piece of the Year from The Comment Awards and the Sanford St. Martin Trust Radio Award Winner for excellence in religious reporting. In 2015 he was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year by The Comment Awards and the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “It’s the powerless on whose behalf he writes,” said the Center’s director. In 2009 he won the James Cameron award for the “combined moral vision and professional integrity” of his coverage of the Obama campaign. From 2001 to 2003 he won Best Newspaper Journalist in Britain’s Ethnic Minority Media Awards three years in a row.

Younge’s breakthrough came when the Guardian commissioned him to cover Nelson Mandela’s presidential election campaign in South Africa in 1993. It was undoubtedly an exciting, but ominous challenge. Opposition to the white supremacist regime was one of the great campaigns of the second half of the 20th century. Racism and loss of empire played a big part in Brexit, he says, “but there were deeper things going on in terms of dislocation, economic disintegration, alienation … The centre of British politics was always happy to cede the immigration discussion to the right … While I couldn’t have told you which way Britain was going to vote on Brexit, the Brexit vote didn’t change anything that I thought about Britain. People were saying, ‘I went to bed in one country, I woke up in another.’ Not only is that literally not true, it’s not even metaphorically true. You went to sleep in a country where xenophobia had been allowed to run riot for years and then you woke up with the consequences of that. The difference is that you didn’t think that it was going to affect you.” He has observed a lot of changes since, he says. “With the boom and with the arrival of a kind of post-colonial migration, people started to assume that my brother was a Nigerian asylum seeker on the make.” Younge himself experienced someone shouting racist abuse at him from a car during a recent visit. “I’m reminded [of Noel Ignatiav’s book] How the Irish became White … Ireland [had] been peripheral within the European space, then got a different lease of life ... You see this rising racial hostility, but the other stuff hasn’t gone – that sense of, ‘We’re all immigrants’... There is this contested space, which I think has been happening for a while, with a new, borrowed xenophobia in a struggle with a very embedded sense of being an underdog and being a migrant culture.”Nelson Mandela campaigns at a rally before the first democratic elections in South Africa, 1994. Photograph: Louise Gubb/Corbis/Getty Images Arguably though, the most challenging contribution is the article Riots are a Class Act—and often they’re the only alternative. This is a thoughtful and provocative piece, which showcases Younge’s brilliant use of language. Questioning the very use of terminology he asks, “What were the French and American revolutions but riots, endowed by Enlightenment principles and blessed by history?” When commenting on the ultimate weakness of young rioters, he observes, “Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week. But what they really need is a party—a political organisation that will articulate their aspirations.” This was the article that launched my career, and within a few months I was offered a staff job. Originally I had wanted to be the Moscow correspondent. But in 1996 I was awarded the Laurence Stern fellowship, which sends one young British journalist to the Washington Post every year to work for a summer on the national desk. I fell in love with an American. Within three years I had written a book about travelling through America’s deep south; within seven I was the Guardian’s New York correspondent. His books have also received considerable acclaim. In 2017 Another Day in the Death of America won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia Journalism School and Nieman Foundation. In the US the book was shortlisted for the Helen Berenstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism from New York Public Library and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award as well as longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction from the American Library Association. In Britain it was shortlisted for The Jhalak prize, The Orwell Prize for Books, The CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and The Bread and Rose Award. Who Are We? was shortlisted for the Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize. No Place Like Home was shortlisted for The Guardian’s first book award. Fragrant steam rising over a meaty grill’ at Mangal 1. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/The Guardian

He has enjoyed several prizes for his journalism. In 2023 he was awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism which honours contributions which strive to meet Orwell's own ambition to make "political writing into an art". The judges praised his work: " for its long form elements and maturity," describing him as, "a journalist who throughout his career has shown a commitment to exploring, explaining and challenging his audience - his work in this award 'takes us to uncomfortable places but with clarity, humanity and empathy’. In 2018 he won (Broadsheet) Feature Writer of the year at the Society of Editors Press Awards for “brilliant in-depth journalism that told a familiar story in a new way {and] had a real impact" for a year-long series on knife crime. He also won Feature of the Year from the Amnesty Media Awards for an article in the same series. In 2017 he received the James Aaronson Career Achievement Award from Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2016 he won the Sanford St. Martin Trust Radio Award for excellence in religious reporting for a BBC documentary on gay marriage in the evangelical community. In 2015 he was awarded the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “It’s the powerless on whose behalf he writes,” said the Center’s director. In 2009 he won the James Cameron award for the “combined moral vision and professional integrity” of his coverage of the Obama campaign. From 2001 to 2003 he won Best Newspaper Journalist in Britain’s Ethnic Minority Media Awards three years in a row. Younge is a great admirer of that speech and recognised the radicalism that marked King’s final years. He seeks to rescue the reputation of a fearless fighter, who’s been unfairly characterised as a sellout or mythologised as a liberal in the decades since his assassination in April 1968. That advice, which came from older white journalists (pretty much the only older journalists available when I started out), was rarely malicious. They thought they were looking out for me. A fear of being “pigeonholed” is one of the most common crippling anxieties of any minority in any profession. Being seen only as the thing that makes you different by those with the power to make that difference matter really is limiting. Join award-winning author, broadcaster and former US correspondent, columnist and editor-at-large at The Guardian, Gary Younge at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth to hear him speak about his recent book, Dispatches from the Diaspora.Born in Hertfordshire to Barbadian parents, he grew up in Stevenage until he was 17 when he went to Kassala, Sudan with Project Trust to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school. On his return he attended Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh where he studied French and Russian (Translating and Interpreting). Join the former Guardian columnist for a wide-ranging conversation – from his frontline view if these big political moments, to his memories of getting drunk with Maya Angelou in her limousine and discussing politics with Stormzy, to why he believes all statues of historical figures – from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes – should be taken down. He will be talking to Guardian writer Nesrine Malik. As a teenager Younge had attended Anti-Apartheid Movement protests outside South Africa House in London with his mother. And he went on to set up an anti apartheid organisation as a student at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. He keenly felt the responsibility of writing the article. He got his politics from his mother. “We had, as a mother, this very determined woman … a feminist, an antiracist and an anti-colonialist, who would never use any of those words about herself. I grew up knowing to identify with [IRA hunger striker] Bobby Sands and that I was on his team, not the other team ... I must have been like, 11 or 12, so I didn’t know all of the issues. I was raised, first of all as an outsider, and secondly, with a very broad assumption that the dominant narrative is a lie.”

Born in Hertfordshire to Barbadian parents, he grew up in Stevenage until he was 17 when he went to Kassala, Sudan with Project Trust to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school. On his return he attended Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh where he studied French and Russian, Translating and Interpreting. Gary Younge is a journalist who throughout his career has shown a commitment to exploring, explaining and challenging his audience - his work … takes us to uncomfortable places but with clarity, humanity and empathy.” —from the judges who awarded Younge the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism.To be fair to Obama, he never promised radical change. And Younge argues that given the institutions he was embedded in meant he was never going to be in a position to deliver much. He notes, “You don’t get to be President of the United States without raising millions from very wealthy people and corporations (or being a billionaire yourself), who will turn against you if you don’t serve their interests.” But Younge quite rightly goes on to say, “This excuses Obama nothing. On any number of fronts, particularly the economy, the banks and civil liberties he could have done more, better.” It should be added that Obama recognised the mobilising power of grassroots organisation. He happily relied upon them to get elected, only to marginalise them once he had captured the Oval Office. Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly a columnist and an editor-at-large at the Guardian, he is an editorial board member of The Nation magazine. He is the author of five books, including Another Day in the Death of America (shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Jhalak Prize); his writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the New Statesman and beyond, and he has made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit. He lives in London. After several years of reporting from all over Europe, Africa, the US and the Caribbean Gary was appointed The Guardian’s US correspondent in 2003, writing first from New York and then Chicago. In 2015 he returned to London where is now The Guardian’s editor-at-large. A vital and richly researched blend of reportage, memoir and polemic, it invites us ringside with Younge during some of the most history-defining events of the last century: Obama’s victory, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, Nelson Mandela’s first election campaign and more.

Join the former Guardian columnist for a wide-ranging conversation - from his frontline view if these big political moments, to his memories of getting drunk with Maya Angelou in her limousine and discussing politics with Stormzy, to why he believes all statues of historical figures – from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes – should be taken down. He will be talking to Guardian writer Nesrine Malik. He writes frequently about the specific ways in which racism and identity express themselves across place and time. Younge’s brother lives in Ireland, so he spends time here. While visiting in the late 80s and early 90s he was sometimes treated with “a sense of exoticism”, but he also felt “a broad, reflexive identification with a sense of oppression”.The final section, “Me, Myself and I” is a selection of “personal essays on experiences that have shaped” the author’s “life and thinking”. It includes a touching tribute to his mother, who died aged 44, and a reflection on what she and the island of her birth instilled in him. In his final year of at Heriot Watt he was awarded a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at City University and started working at The Guardian in 1993. In 1996 he was awarded the Laurence Stern Fellowship, which sends a young British journalist to work at the Washington Post for three months. He remains hopeful about change, but not through misplaced optimism. As he noted in his final Guardian column, he believes as Karl Marx that human beings have the capacity to make our own history if not in circumstances of our own choosing. He therefore signed off with the words,