Selina Brown, founder of the Black British Book Festival, has been awarded the inaugural Queen’s Reading Room Medal by Her Majesty Queen Camilla, becoming the first person ever to receive the honour and the first to be named the United Kingdom’s National Reading Hero. The ceremony took place at Clarence House, where a reception that brought together some of the literary world’s most celebrated voices, including Sir Ben Okri, Jojo Moyes, Richard Osman, and Lee Child, alongside Hollywood icons Sigourney Weaver and Stanley Tucci.
Brown was recognised specifically for her work founding the Black British Book Festival, which has reached over 100,000 people and expanded into a national movement spanning London, Manchester and Birmingham, and for her Reading for Smiles programme, which has brought inclusive books into primary schools in areas with low literacy rates, with teachers reporting that children who once avoided reading now borrow books weekly and write their own stories.
The recognition is a landmark not just for Brown personally, but for the broader project she represents: the insistence that Black British literature deserves a platform and a permanent home. Brown built the Black British Book Festival from the ground up in 2021, with no industry network and no institutional backing, funding it herself as a single mother of three, driven by the conviction that Black British stories deserved a world-class stage. In five years, she has opened two community libraries and placed books in spaces as unlikely as barbershops and marketplaces. As one teacher from Wolverhampton put it, it was “the first time our pupils truly saw themselves in books.”
In her newsletter announcing the news, Brown wrote of the weight of the moment and the history it carries:
“At Clarence House, I received the inaugural Queen’s Reading Room Medal and was named the UK’s National Reading Hero. This follows five years of building the Black British Book Festival into Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature. The medal recognises an outstanding contribution to literature and reading in this country. To be the first person to receive it is something I take seriously. But this moment is part of something much bigger than me. My granny — the first storyteller I ever knew — came to this country from Jamaica in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation. She carried stories, memory and history with her, which I loved listening to. I come from people who were once denied the right to read and from a people of excellence who used the power of words to build and shape culture.”
At Brittle Paper, we have watched the Black British Book Festival with particular interest because of what it means for Black writers, including African writers and writers of the African diaspora, who too often find the doors of mainstream British publishing closed to them. Since its inaugural edition in Birmingham in 2021, the BBBF has become one of the most important stages for Black literary voices in Europe, and the authors it has platformed speak to both the range and the ambition of Brown’s vision. Early editions drew figures like David Olusoga, Lenny Henry, and the Zimbabwean-Scottish speculative fiction writer T.L. Huchu. The 2023 festival at the Southbank Centre opened with Leigh-Anne Pinnock launching her memoir Believe, and brought together over sixty of the UK’s most respected Black authors, media figures, and publishing professionals. For many of these writers, the BBBF has not simply been a stage but a proof of concept, evidence that there is a vast, hungry readership for Black British stories that the mainstream publishing industry has consistently underestimated.
The prestigious award, launched by Queen Camilla, aims to honour individuals who are transforming lives through reading at a time when literacy rates continue to decline nationwide. Alongside Brown, Liz Waterland was named Local Reading Hero for her decade-long dedication to community literacy in Lincolnshire.
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