This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre Pigott Theatre and is also available to watch online. Tickets may be booked to attend in person, or to watch on our platform either live or during the next 7 days on catch up. Viewing links for the online version will be sent out in the confirmation email you receive after booking.

“If you’re black you were born in jail,” said Malcolm X, the Black nationalist spokesman for the Nation of Islam, who was reviled by white America during the Civil Rights era. He argued there’d be no peace for “blue-eyed devils” (white people) without a reckoning for the sins of the past.  And after his assassination in 1965, many African Americans viewed him as a prophetic revolutionary whose fierce strategy of opposition "by any means necessary" was adopted by the Black Panthers.  Malcolm X’s spirit of resistance increasingly spoke to people worldwide emerging from the oppression of colonialism and dictatorships. 
 
For the centenary of Malcolm X’s birth, WritersMosaic, in collaboration with the British Library Eccles Institute, brings together writers and performers including Bonnie Greer, Gary Younge, Vanessa Kisuule and Colin Grant to explore the global legacy of Malcolm X as a resistance leader.

Reduced price tickets available for British Library Members, and half price tickets for students, under 26 and other concession groups. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk

Venue Doors and Bar open at 18:00.  Please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

Bonnie Greer’s plays, books and novels are concerned with the lives of minorities within majority cultures, particularly those of women. A regular presence on TV and radio, she has been Arts Council playwright in residence at the Soho Theatre, and at the Black Theatre Co-operative. She was awarded the Verity Bargate Award for Best Play by the Soho Theatre Company. She has had over a dozen plays produced on BBC Radio; one short film for BBC 2, and co-produced and wrote and presented the documentary on Black art in the West: Reflecting Skin (2004) for the BBC. Her books include Hanging by Her Teeth (1994), Entropy (2009) and Obama Music (2009).
 
Colin Grant is the Director of WritersMosaic, his books include Bageye at the Wheel, short-listed for the Pen Ackerley Prize, and Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His latest book is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. His oral history of migration to Britain, What We Leave We Carry will be published in 2025.  Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and director of WritersMosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund. He also writes for a number of newspapers including the TLS, Guardian, Observer and New York Review of Books.
 
Gary Younge is an author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media. He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. 
 
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won more than ten slam titles including the Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuyorican Poetry Slam. Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, ‘Hollow’, went viral in the summer of 2020. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She was the Bristol City Poet for 2018-2020 and is currently working on her debut novel.

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