Afua Hirsch, 'The Re-enchantment of the world'
Afua Hirsch is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and former barrister known for her work on culture, social justice. Identity and anti-racism.
Afua is the founder of Born in Me, a TV and film production company which creates scripted and non-scripted television documentaries, dramas, and podcasts. She is the presenter of the BBC series African Renaissance, season 2 of which will launch later this month, and Enslaved, the 6-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson, as well as a podcast series for Audible. Last year she was creative chair of the 2022 Edinburgh TV Festival, the most prestigious TV event in the UK.
A journalist for more than twenty years, Afua began writing for the Voice Newspaper – Britain’s oldest black newspaper – as a teenager in the mid 1990’s. Since then she has been a senior Guardian correspondent, Sky News editor, and regularly writes for publications including the New York Times, Time Magazine, American and British Vogue, where she is a contributing editor. In 2019 she became the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she teachers graduate students on international reporting.
Afua’s bestselling book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize. Her other books include Equal To Everything, about the UK Supreme Court, and Empire: Look Again. Her fourth book Decolonising My Body will be published this October, with Penguin imprint Square Peg. Afua holds a degree from Oxford University, and honorary doctorates from London’s South Bank University and The University of Oxford Brookes. She has been voted one of the ten most influential black people in the UK and the 100 most influential people of African descent in the world.
Afua Hirsch hosted the Andrew Carnagie Lecture on the 31 May 2023 at the University of Glasgow.
The recording of her lecture 'The Re-enchantment of the world' can be viewd Here.