“The very first adult book I plucked off that shelf and read was about a cowboy who’d fallen on hard times and the school teacher who’d offered up her home and her heart—and more, although the metaphors for various human appendages went over my head. Later I would learn what a Harlequin Romance was, but at the time, while the plot was engaging, I was bored by the frequent interruptions of stuff I didn’t quite understand. So I moved on to the next shelf. That’s where the dragons lived.”Build that bookshelf and they will come. “Jonah partnered with Roots Ethiopia soon after he realized he could do something great with his craft. By selling his crochet works, along with official Jonah’s Hands merchandise, Jonah has not only raised enough money to build the school library, but he’s surpassed that initial fundraising goal and is now putting his proceeds toward a science lab in the same community.”This beautiful child is a crochet wizard AND has written two books! “The interesting thing is that I’m not usually called a political writer. And I am a political writer! There is a political underpinning to Girl, Woman, Other, which is to explore as many black British women as possible in a single novel. The intention is for the reader to enjoy the book on the level of story, but at the same time, they’re engaging with all these issues. This is my eighth book, and all of them have been very political in terms of the ideas, the context of my characters and the subversive way in which I’m exploring the Afro-diasporic experience and black British history and society. But the context for my work has altered. After I won the Booker in October, everything changed. People are reading my book now, irrespective of the labels that are imposed on it. So, I’m not concerned that seeing it as “political fiction” will challenge people to such an extent that they won’t want to read it.”Most literature is political, whether we realize it or not.
