Margaret Busby

Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-foundeded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby (A & B) in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons".In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.

Quotes

• It's really just showing that there is more that you could be enjoying, that you could be learning from, that you could be reading.

• It is easy enough to be the first, we can each try something and be the first woman or the first African woman to do X, Y or Z. But, if it’s something worthwhile you don’t want to be the only. …I hope that I can, in any way, inspire someone to do what I have done but learn from my mistakes and do better than I have done.
• Sometimes people ask me how long it took me to put that together and I always say that it either took about a couple of years or all my life, depending on how you look at it.
• No, when you’re doing something you do it because you have a passion for doing it or you want to see it come to fruition but you’re not necessarily looking beyond that. It certainly has had an impact on people – people as readers, people as writers – because I think there were a lot of people who read that book who wanted to be writers and were influenced by it in one way or another. So, I guess it has had an influence and has a continuing influence; this new anthology demonstrates a continuing link to those writers and that whole literary history of women of African descent who are using words creatively, whether orature, spoken word, speeches, the written word, different genres.
• The internet has made it possible for writers to have greater visibility and to access different parts of their literary history but I don’t think things have necessarily changed so much towards literary responses to black women writers of African descent. Somehow a lot of praise is still kept on a few, as if they have to represent everybody, and they’re the only ones who will actually get that sort of literary accreditation and critical attention.
• It’s really just showing that there is more that you could be enjoying, that you could be learning from, that you could be reading. There are things that could open your mind, that could enlighten you that you have to seek out for yourself because it is not being offered within your formal curriculum.
• If I said to you, put together an anthology of two-hundred women of European descent that would include everyone from Jane Austen to JK Rowling – that would be difficult! You’d have left out a lot of people and that’s the case here: there are two-hundred wonderful contributors but there are many more that could’ve been in it – so it’s something that I’m proud of but something that in a strange way I’m not quite satisfied with. It’s never a question of saying this was a definitive anthology; the first one wasn’t definitive in that way and this one is not. But anyway it’s a start – I’ll do another one maybe.
• I don’t even know when they do that, sometimes I think that they can only think of a few people so they just bung me on! I think it’s an honour to be thought of in those grandiose terms but I’m not living my life with an ambition to be on some list and I’m not even sure that it’s true – but its a great honour!