THIS WEEK
The Black Issue 2023 Margaret Busby
Publishing pioneer and English PEN president Busby on the pace of change
The UK’s first Black woman publisher discusses how the industry has changed since she embarked on her career in the 1960s—and where progress is still required
Heloise Wood @saltounite
T
here is arguably no one beter placed in the UK publishing industry to speak about how the industry has progressed regarding diversit and inclusion—indeed, whether it has at all—than celebrated publisher Margaret Busby. Busby became Britain’s first Black woman publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby (A&B) with Clive Busby in the late 1960s. Since then she has been a writer, editor, broadcaster, critic and judged many literary prizes, including the Booker. However, despite being named the president of English PEN last month, awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the London Book Fair in 2021, alongside other prizes, and a CBE for services to publishing, she reveals that she still feels “not part of the system”. The Ghana-born publisher and campaigner spoke of many forms of discrimination in the trade: some around struggling to even get into the interview room itself. “While seting up A&B in the evenings and weekends, we subsidised ourselves through employment with other publishers,” she says. “I remember turning up for one interview, aſter replying to an ad in The Bookseller, and the receptionist phoned upstairs and said: ‘There’s a Black girl here who says she’s got an interview.’ You could be stopped in your tracks at the first step by something like that.” She adds: “When A&B was taken over by W H Allen [in 1987], perhaps the assumption was that I had made the tea for 20 years, since I didn’t get given a job while Clive did.” Busby went on to be editorial director
of environmental publisher Earthscan for several years and has freelanced for the past
10 26th May 2023
three decades, though this was not neces- sarily through choice. She muses that her long freelancing career happened “because [she] didn’t fit into the prevailing publishing structure”, even with all of her accolades and experience. “As a Black woman, I’ve frequently found myself working with a white man and quite oſten the narrative from others is, ‘He must be in charge, talk to him’,” she says. “You work alongside someone who is meant to be your equal, but other people auto- matically approach him and tell him things, or he does things and doesn’t let you know. In
We all need to be part of the whole industry, so that it is not a novelty to have in-house Black personnel... No one should feel marginalised Margaret Busby, English PEN president
fact, I jokingly call it ‘The Male Oddit’, which stands for ‘Oh, dear, didn’t I tell you?’” Busby hopes that the groundswell of discus- sion around diversit in recent years is not just lip-service. “Things have changed—noticeably in the past two years, with awareness raised by the Black Lives Mater movement aſter the murder of George Floyd. Suddenly
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