The book I am currently reading
When the world feels like it’s on fire, I often step back into the recent past for answers. I’ve just started The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. It’s strange and gripping and triggers nostalgia for the 90s.
The book that changed my life
How we acquire a book can shape its hold over us. When I was travelling in my early 20s, I stumbled upon Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight and found it so evocative. It amazed me how a dead writer could reach across time, race and space and make me care about people whose lives had a completely different logic to my own.
The book I wish I’d written
Take any sentence from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and you could present it as a standalone stanza of poetry. I admire it for being short yet epic, beautiful and ugly, nuanced but fiercely political.
The book that most influenced my writing
Years ago, my mentor, Caryl Phillips, put me on to Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, perhaps the most illuminating account of the black experience in postwar London.
The book I think is most underrated
Richard Power Sayeed’s 1997 chronicles the rise and fall of New Labour. Reading it I saw, with clarity and perhaps for the first time, the defining story of my generation, who came of age in Blair’s Britain.
The book that changed my mind
A good companion piece to 1997 is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. In the 00s, I fell for the centre-left New Labour stuff hook, line and sinker. Fisher showed how neoliberal capitalism swallowed up the left, leaving us with no alternative, and exposed leftist frauds like me.
The last book that made me cry
Years ago, I witnessed Roger Robinson perform his poem “Grace” in the US when we were on tour together. It’s about his newborn son’s tremulous first seconds on Earth. He shed a tear onstage, with the audience joining him. When I read it in his masterly collection A Portable Paradise, it was just as emotive.
The book I couldn’t finish
Black and Blur by Fred Moten. It sits on my bookshelves half-read, although strategically placed so academic friends know I own it.
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
My partner Natasha is named after the character in War and Peace. I know I won’t defeat my imposter syndrome – or Natasha’s wrath – until I read it. It’s just … so long.
My earliest reading memory
Linda Lowery’s Spell of the Winter Wizard. It’s part of a series of 80s children’s fantasy books called Endless Quest, where you control the narrative through multiple-choice questions. They taught me to always leave room for the reader.
The book I give as a gift
Freeplay: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch.
Johny Pitts’s Afropean won the 2020 Jhalak prize
