The youngest publisher as well as the first black (Ghanaian-born) woman publisher in the UK: in 20 years of publishing, writing, editing and broadcasting, Margaret Busby has given voice to hundreds of brilliant writers, ranging from the post-colonial brilliance of Trinidadian author CLR James to gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson (of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fame), and through her now famous Daughters of Africa anthologies, which brought 200 women writers into the mainstream.

Little wonder she has been showered with accolades, including a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. Most recently, Busby was chair of the 2020 Booker Prize judges, one of the most prestigious in literature.

With our conversation continually interrupted by the sounds of tropical rain on galvanised roofs, Busby sat down with me virtually to break down exactly what makes such an extraordinary career, and to dig into the true meaning of diversity.

You’ve clearly been able to spot talent and edit incisively. Take us behind the scenes of a top-tier publishing meeting. What is that process like?

We were both so young (Busby and her business partner Clive Allison). We conceived the idea of starting our own publishing company at university, and found authors in very different ways from the usual. We first published a writer we met in a pub!

A friend of my husband met Sam Greenlee (author of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the first novel Busby published) and because we were so small – there were just two of us – Clive Allison and I were doing everything. I wrote the cover, I made the blurb. It wasn’t a huge number of people. It was just a couple of young people – two or three of us.

Someone heard that books about animals were popular. So we said, let’s publish a book about animals! We ended up publishing a book about rats (laughs). We published books about songs to sing in the bath, which we printed on waterproof paper. We had to fight to get authors reviewed.

[caption id="attachment_911945" align="alignnone" width="737"] Publisher Margaret Busby -[/caption]

We had no official distribution in the early days. One of the ways we distributed our books is stopping people in the streets!

So often I go to festivals and there is this “them and us” mentality, and I don’t want that to be the case. It almost seems as though people are asking: what are “they” (the publishing and arts establishment) going to do for "us"? “We” are on the outside and “they” are on the inside. People think: somebody else is going to make us rich and famous.

But we can be on the other side (the side of the establishment). We (Allison & Busby) publish books because they are good books. We’re letting people into our hallowed halls. We should all be there to make it richer. We have to claim it – we have to be involved in everything. I always think of somebody like Toni Morrison (Nobel-prize winning author) – she was also a pub