From the critically-acclaimed author of Duppy Conqueror, this short story collection reflects the Black experience in post-Windrush London.

About this event

In The Black and White Museum Ferdinand Dennis has created a powerful collection of short stories on the Black experience, exploring loss and a longing for a true sense of home.

"I first encountered the short story form during my West London Comprehensive schooldays in Doris Lessing’s Nine African Short Stories. Since then I have devoured short stories from de Maupassant, Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Flannery O’Connor, Marquez, John Cheever and William Trevor, as well as collections from the Caribbean, North and South America and Britain". - Ferdinand Dennis

At their heart, these highly personal and universal short stories reveal the emotional drama of faded loss, the loss of individual and shared memory, and the wistful longing for home. Ferdinand Dennis’s stories powerfully portray the black presence in post-Windrush London, with its hurtling gentrification and everyday racism. His characters gain wisdom and maturity with age but become powerless, as they are less able to change the course of their lives. For some there is the temptation of a return ‘home’ but home, like London, has also moved on and is not the paradise of their memories.

Bio

Ferdinand Dennis was born in 1956 in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to London at the age of eight. He is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, the author of the novels The Sleepless Summer, The Last Blues Dance and Duppy Conqueror (also published by Small Axes), and his non-fiction includes Back to Africa: A Journey, and Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain, for which he was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. In the words of Dr James Procter, ‘Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background, Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots.’ Ferdinand Dennis lives in North London.

Join us for this special occasion, which takes place following the book's publication by the new imprint Small Axes (Hope Road) on 2 December 2021.

A Renaissance One event in association with Hope Road Publishing.