I am one of these obsessive people that find myself going back, going “Oh! Oh! Oh yes! That was that person’s classmate” and “Oh yes! It’s the same t… - Abena Busia

And that’s important. I do want us to turn to your own writing, but I have to acknowledge that it is characteristic of you not only that you have been an activist but that you always acknowledge the people that you’ve been working with, and the importance of a collective voice and solidarity has always been part of your work which some of us really appreciate. I’m going to extrapolate something from that, that may or may not be true, and that is: I see that collec-tivity actually in the structure of your novels.

Hello everybody and thank you for joining us, wherever in the world you’re joining us from. My name is Abena Busia. I am a Ghanaian, very proud to be so, a Ghanaian writer and poet, and currently Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil. I am very, very honoured today, however, to be part of this festival and to interview a friend of mine, an extraordinary woman herself who today is best known for co-winning the 2019 Booker Prize with her eighth book, Girl,Woman, Other, making her the first Black woman to win it. But for some of us, her reputation preceded that.

I came to the United States of America conscious of my African-ness, conscious of my blackness, I became conscious of women studies and became a feminist.