Brief info
Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) 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 organisations 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 20 years from the late 1960s, she published an international list of more than 300 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 ground-breaking 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. Her collected writing, Part of the Story: Half a Century of Writings, was published by Hamish Hamilton in March 2026.