Tangled Roots: Real Life Stories from Mixed Race Britain

Posted in Anthologies, Autobiography, Books, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2018-05-30 21:51Z by Steven

Tangled Roots: Real Life Stories from Mixed Race Britain

Tangled Roots
2015-12-11
205 pages
ISBN: 978-0993482403

Edited by:

Katy Massey

12% of UK households are mixed race. These are our stories.

The Tangled Roots book brings together over 30 writers to answer the question: What is life like for mixed families in Britain today?

Five leading authors—Bernardine Evaristo MBE, Sarfraz Manzoor, Charlotte Williams OBE, Diana Evans and Hannah Lowetogether with 27 members of the public tell the story of their mixed lives with heart-breaking honesty, humour and compassion.

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26a

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, United Kingdom on 2018-04-10 02:42Z by Steven

26a

Vintage
2006-03-02
240 Pages
129mm x 198mm x 15mm
170g
Paperback ISBN: 9780099479048
eBook ISBN: 9781409079620

Diana Evans

  • Winner of the Orange Award for New Writers
  • Winner of the deciBel Writer of the Year Award
  • Shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award
  • Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award
  • Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book Award
  • Shortlisted for the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough Award
  • Recipient of a Betty Trask Award
  • Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, and baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson. It is when the reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way. How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of separateness and solitude, and which of them will be stronger?

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Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United Kingdom, Women on 2010-03-25 18:19Z by Steven

Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans

Women: A Cultural Review
Volume 20, Issue 3 (December 2009)
pages 277-286
DOI: 10.1080/09574040903285735

Pilar Cuder-Domnguez, Associate Professor
University of Huelva, Spain

The first novels published by Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans feature twins of mixed-race parentage—a Nigerian mother and an English father—growing up in Britain. Eight-year-old Jessamy in Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl is unaware that she was born a twin, but on travelling to Nigeria she encounters TillyTilly, a troublesome girl she seems unable to shake off. Georgia and Bessi in Evans’s 26a are identical twins who share all their experiences until a visit to their mother’s homeland of Nigeria opens a breach in their perfect union. Both novels were published in 2005 and display certain commonalities of plot, characterisation, location and stylistic choice. Oyeyemi and Evans both explore Yoruba beliefs surrounding the special nature of twins—half way between the world of humans and gods. If one twin dies, parents commission a carving called ‘ibeji‘ to honour the deceased and to provide a location for their soul. The specialness attributed to twins by the Yoruba is compounded in both novels by the fact that they are mixed-race and by the diverging locations, cultures and languages of their parents. Thus, this article addresses how the two writers deploy Yoruba beliefs in order to raise questions about the cultural grounding of their characters’ identities, and how being twins becomes a metaphor for the ‘double consciousness’ of being black and British.

Read or purchase the article here.

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