Margaret Busby, born Nana Akua Ackon, CBE, Hon. FRSL, has spent more than fifty years at the centre of cultural life in the UK, championing Black writers, intellectuals, and artists with a consistency and depth that few in publishing have matched.

She became Britain’s youngest and first Black woman publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby in the late 1960s, going on to publish over three hundred authors, among them Buchi Emecheta, C. L. R. James, and George Lamming, and later edited two of the most consequential anthologies in the African literary tradition: Daughters of Africa (1992) and New Daughters of Africa (2019). In 2023, she was appointed President of English PEN. She has judged the Booker Prize, served on the board of the Caine Prize, and the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award, which funds young women from Africa to pursue postgraduate study in the UK, bears her name. She has been, for half a century, the person quietly making room for the rest of us.

Now, for the first time, the focus turns to her own writing. Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century, published today by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin), collects Busby’s own literary output — essays, criticism, and reflections on people, places, politics, and publishing — offering a portrait of a life shaped by her childhood in Ghana and her decades spent championing the writers and artists the mainstream was slow to recognise. It is 512 pages, and it is long overdue.

The responses from writers who know her work speak to what this book represents. Zadie Smith writes that Busby has been “a cheerleader, instigator, organiser, defender and celebrator of black arts for the past 50 years.” Bernardine Evaristo calls it “an astonishing revelation.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has cited her as an inspiration. Rather than considering these accolades as polite endorsements, they are acknowledgements of a debt. For African literature in the diaspora especially, Busby’s editorial and curatorial work has been foundational; Part of the Story is the opportunity to understand the mind and the sensibility behind it all, in her own words.

Part of the Story is available now in hardback, ebook, and audio download, here.