Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge was born in London in 1989 to a Nigerian mother, and built a career as a journalist writing primarily about feminism and structural racism. In 2014, exhausted by repeatedly having the same unproductive conversations about race with people unwilling to examine their own assumptions, she wrote a blog post titled “Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race” — an essay that struck such a nerve it was expanded into a full book, published in 2017.

The book became a genuine cultural phenomenon. Following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Eddo-Lodge's book rocketed 155 places up the UK non-fiction paperback chart. On 16 June 2020, it achieved something no book by a Black British woman had ever achieved before: reaching number one in the UK's overall book charts, encompassing both fiction and non-fiction.

That same period saw Bernardine Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other simultaneously top the UK fiction paperback chart — the first time books by Black British women had topped both charts at once. Eddo-Lodge's achievement has since been recognised with the Jhalak Prize and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing, cementing her as one of the defining British voices on race and structural inequality of her generation.