Searching for Home in England and Africa

Black Gold of the Sun

A personal journey in search of belonging, family and the meaning of blackness, by one of Britain's finest cultural commentators

Ekow Eshun is a writer, curator and broadcaster. He is author of the memoir Black Gold of the Sun, nominated for the Orwell Prize for its exploration of race and identity, and The Strangers, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Hailed by the Guardian as ‘a cultural polymath’, he was the first Black editor of a major magazine in the UK and went on to become the first Black director of a leading British arts institution. He has created documentaries for BBC TV and radio and his writing appears in publications including the Guardian, The New York Times and Financial Times. 
 
Described by Vogue as ‘the most inspired – and inspiring – curator in Britain’, Ekow Eshun has curated critically acclaimed exhibitions internationally, working with venues including the Hayward Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as museums and galleries in Asia, Africa and the United States. He is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing Britain’s foremost public art programme. He lives in London.

'Where are you from?'  'No, where are you really from?'  These questions, which he has been asked since boyhood, drive Ekow Eshun to travel through Ghana in search of his roots, and lead him on an exploration of history and belonging, from slavery in Africa and the West to the present day and what it means to be black.  In search of answers, Ekow unearths yet more questions, some shocking contradictions and some long-forgotten truths about his family past...

Ekow Eshun

A generous gift . . .The author inhabits the perspective of five figures, from Malcolm X to footballer Justin Fashanu, in this lyrical account of their lives, a thrilling affront to the archives that exclude them . . . Each chapter is absorbing, no matter how much you already know about each person

Mesmerising. A book of creative non-fiction centred on important Black historical figures... Ekow Eshun brings them beautifully, movingly to life

Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2024)

An extraordinary feat of empathy. Innovative [and] intimate... this book is an act of rapprochement rendered with great emotional intelligence and tenderness. Remarkable

One for the intellectually curious. Eshun mixes biography and imagination to craft essays based on the lives of five Black men from history. Interspersed with thoughts about the author's own experiences as a Black man, the stories cross generations, and form part of a wider narrative about race, culture and historical amnesia

Ekow Eshun is a genius. He holds a torch where institutions have refused to look and helps us all to see through shadows to the magnificent strangers. His writings on the Black aesthetic are unsurpassed – and my world is a better place because he is writing in it. This book will be referenced for years to come

This book is astounding. Told with a rigour and intimacy that only Ekow Eshun could conjure… In a world where Blackness is synonymous with death, The Strangers portrays scenes of beauty, of fullness – of just what it means to be alive'

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of 'Open Water'

Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book. Ekow Eshun resurrects five pioneering figures, connecting them thematically to each other while constantly recalibrating the contexts around them, revealing wider global histories, cultures and patterns of power. Compelling and imaginatively expansive, this is something very special – creative non-fiction that inspires, stirs and challenges the reader

Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of 'Girl, Woman, Other'

Beautiful, powerful and haunting, this book defies erasure with imagination and integrity

Staggering. Outside of Baldwin himself, I can’t think of a creative approach to critique that hit me as hard as this. The storytelling, the archival work, the erudition and research behind it, the capacity for invention (down to the use of dialogue), and—one of my favourite aspects of this book—its singular, inventive use of form. It’s rare to read a book that’s so invigorating, intervening with freshness and new clarity in longstanding conversations; and that gives you such a striking new way of describing and seeing your own world. If this doesn’t become a classic, then I don’t know what ever could

Jason Allen-Paisant, T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of 'Self-Portrait as Othello'

The Strangers is diamantine – multifaceted, sharp and exceptionally bright. I was captivated by its vivid depiction of these five Black lives

Wholly unique and important, written with great compassion and intelligence in Ekow Eshun’s singular, arresting style. He says things that need to be said, with a sweeping eye on history and its impact on our present

A beautifully written, haunting exploration of Black masculinity that pushes the boundaries of genre: part biography, part fiction, part essay, part historical record, woven together seamlessly to produce an original, rich and compelling narrative. It provides a vital insight into the importance of Black contributions to Western culture – contributions that have so often been denied. I can’t praise The Strangers highly enough: its impact remains long after the final pages and it deserves to be widely read

Jacqueline Roy, author of 'The Fat Lady Sings'

This book is life-changing. I want to press it into so many hands

Moving, thoughtful, redemptive. The Strangers is an important book. It will become a Black classic

Elegant, evocative, moving – I think it’s brilliant. I’ve never read a book like it and I’m wiser for reading it

The architecture of this book is extraordinary, the execution exceptional. A work of literary portraiture which is meticulously researched, beautifully expressed and above all moving and evocative. I was educated and enriched to the very last page

Charlotte Williams, author of 'Sugar and Slate'

Unputdownable and fiercely tender - through these five men, five masks, five mirrors, we meet ourselves. This act of docu-poetry should be required reading for all

Es Devlin, award-winning artist and stage designer

Artfully delves into the minds and motivations of five pioneering Black men

Guardian, 'The best biographies and memoirs of 2024'

Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them

In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. 
 
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask? 
 
In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future. 
 
Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

Ekow Eshun

Praise for The Strangers

A generous gift . . .The author inhabits the perspective of five figures, from Malcolm X to footballer Justin Fashanu, in this lyrical account of their lives, a thrilling affront to the archives that exclu ...

Mesmerising. A book of creative non-fiction centred on important Black historical figures... Ekow Eshun brings them beautifully, movingly to life

An extraordinary feat of empathy. Innovative [and] intimate... this book is an act of rapprochement rendered with great emotional intelligence and tenderness. Remarkable

A generous gift . . .The author inhabits the perspective of five figures, from Malcolm X to footballer Justin Fashanu, in this lyrical account of their lives, a thrilling affront to the archives that exclu ...

Mesmerising. A book of creative non-fiction centred on important Black historical figures... Ekow Eshun brings them beautifully, movingly to life

An extraordinary feat of empathy. Innovative [and] intimate... this book is an act of rapprochement rendered with great emotional intelligence and tenderness. Remarkable

A generous gift . . .The author inhabits the perspective of five figures, from Malcolm X to footballer Justin Fashanu, in this lyrical account of their lives, a thrilling affront to the archives that exclu ...

Mesmerising. A book of creative non-fiction centred on important Black historical figures... Ekow Eshun brings them beautifully, movingly to life

An extraordinary feat of empathy. Innovative [and] intimate... this book is an act of rapprochement rendered with great emotional intelligence and tenderness. Remarkable

Books by Ekow Eshun

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