Black History Month

Black History Month (BHM) is held every October in Britain. The key aims are to:

The origins of BHM go back to 1926 when Carter G Woodson, editor for 30 years of the Journal of Negro History, established African Caribbean celebrations in America. It is still celebrated there in February each year. Akyaaba Addai Sebbo is viewed as the person who set up Black History Month in Britain. Akyaaba worked for the Greater London Council (GLC) and worked with them to establish the event in 1987.

One of the key aspects of this year's BHM will be to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

"We could call it just history month, but it's more than that. It's about forgotten heroes and stories that we never get told at school. We are taught more about the Battle of Waterloo at school than the relevance of Dr Martin Luther King. We hope this month goes some way to fill in the gaps."

Willber Wilberforce, Director of Programmes, 1xtra

Waterstones.com is pleased to be marking Black History Month 2007, highlighting some of the best current books on black history and experience, and profiling some of the world's greatest black authors - check out the author index below.

Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe is an ever-present on university and school syllabuses everywhere, and in recent years authors such as Andrea Levy, who won both the the 2004 Orange Prize and the 2005 Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Award) with her novel of the Caribbean diaspora, Small Island, and the wonderful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize in 2006 with Half of a Yellow Sun, have demonstrated the cultural importance and popularity of both black writing and by extension, black history. Benjamin Zephaniah is one of our most popular and socially aware performance poets, and the precociously brilliant Helen Oyeyemi, who wrote her novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school, is one of the latest crop of talented young black authors.

You can read more about these and many other leading black authors on our Black History Month Author Index