You remember the book “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race?” Reni wrote that bestseller! And just recently, during the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement which spread to several other countries across the world, the book claimed the Number 1 spot in the U.K’s official book charts. The only black author to have taken the No 1 spot on the overall charts is the former US first lady Michelle Obama in 2018, with her memoir Becoming.
The 30 year old British-Nigerian in her 2017 debut explores themes around the conversation about race in the UK, digging deep into why she would no longer engage with “the vast majority” of white people on the topic of race, because they “refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms”.
“Feels absolutely wild to have broken this record,” she wrote while responding to the news on twitter. “My work stands on the shoulders of so many black British literary giants –– Bernadine Evaristo, Benjamin Zephaniah, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Stella Dadzie, Stuart Hall, Linton K Johnson, Jackie Kay, Gary Younge – to name a few”.
This development came just a day over 100 black authors including Evaristo, Benjamin Zephaniah and Malorie Blackman announced the formation of the Black Writers’ Guild (BWG), a new body calling for sweeping change across the publishing industry to address “deep-rooted racial inequalities”.