Ta-Nehisi Coates

After dropping out of Howard University to pursue a career in journalism, Coates took up a post at The Washington City Paper, going on to pen pieces for publications such as The Village Voice and Time. His first article for The Atlantic, This is How We Lost to the White Man, was widely praised and led to a regular column and blog at the venerable magazine. Coates progressed to become a senior editor at The Atlantic, but it was his blog which attracted most acclaim and attention, and particularly his trenchant pieces concerning American attitudes to race.

Coates’ first book, The Beautiful Struggle, was an intimate and thought-provoking memoir of his coming-of-age in West Baltimore and his complex relationship with his Black Panther father. The book was well-reviewed, but it was his second work of non-fiction, Between the World and Me, that brought him to international attention. A searing interrogation of America’s agonised relationship with race told through a series of personal reflections, it won the 2015 National Book Award and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction the next year. A collection of essays covering the era of the Barack Obama presidency, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, followed in 2017, with his acclaimed debut novel The Water Dancer arriving in 2019. Coates’ fourth non-fiction work The Message, an investigation of the danger of political storytelling, was published in 2025. Additionally, Coates’ has also written several Black Panther and Captain America comics for Marvel.