Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa - Tapa blanda

The British Empire is no more, but at its height colonial subjects regarded Britain as the centre, a place of pilgrimage, if not residence. This collection of original essays brings together the distilled experiences of fourteen very different writers from the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. All started life in the former colonies and have either spent extended periods in Britain or settled there - and all have enriched British literature with new themes and ways of seeing, and an exuberant use of language. Their accounts - reflective, anecdotal, autobiographical - of their very different cultural journeys and of how living in Britain has influenced their writing creates a rich medley of voices.

Naseem Khan co-edited the Hustler, one of the earliest Black community newspapers in the 1970s. She researched and wrote 'The Arts Britain Ignores' (1976), the report that heralded wide debate on diversity, the nature of British contemporary society and culture and helped to introduce a change in funding. She was the founding co-ordinator of MAAS, the national umbrella body for Black and Asian arts, has written regularly as a freelance for the national press (including a weekly column for the New Statesman for three years in the 1980s on the arts, 'Work in Progress'), and is author of numerous reports - both as a previous Senior Associate of Comedia and independently - on arts and public policy. She was awarded an OBE in 1999 for 'services to cultural diversity'.