Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora

Conversations with the most distinguished black thinkers of our times, including Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Wole Soyinka and Michelle Obama, on race, decolonisation, systemic inequalities, and the climate crisis.

In a series of incisive and intimate encounters Sarah Ladipo Manyika introduces some of the most distinguished Black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker. She searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. She interrogates the world around us with pioneering publisher Margaret Busby, parliamentarian Lord Michael Hastings and civil rights activist Pastor Evan Mawarire - who dared to take on President Robert Mugabe and has lived to tell the tale.

In journeys that book-end the collection, Sarah Ladipo Manyika reflects on her own experience of being seen as 'oyinbo'; in Nigeria, African in England, Arab in France, coloured in Southern Africa and Black in America, while feeling the least Black and most human among her fellow travellers, explorers all, against the sharp white relief of the South Pole.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a British-Nigerian-American writer of novels, short stories and essays translated into several languages. She is author of the best-selling novel In Dependence and multiple shortlisted novel Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun, and has had work published in publications including Granta, The Guardian, the Washington Post and Transfuge among others. Sarah serves as Board Chair for the women's writing residency, Hedgebrook; she was previously Board Director for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco.

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of seven works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco and Milan. His latest novel, Less Is Lost, is available now.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika photo courtesy of the author. Andrew Sean Greer photo courtesy of Kaliel Roberts.