Margaret Busby

Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest publisher as well as the first black female book publisher in the UK when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby (A & B) in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020, she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.

Education and early years

Margaret Yvonne Busby was born in 1944, in Accra, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Her parents were Dr George Busby and Mrs Sarah Busby (née Christian), who both had family links to the Caribbean, particularly to Trinidad, Barbados and Dominica. Her Barbados-born father, Dr Busby (1899–1980) was a lifelong friend of Kwame Nkrumah's mentor George Padmore and attended school in Trinidad with C. L. R. James at Queen's Royal College, winning the Island Scholarship. This, in turn, enabled him to travel to Britain to study medicine, in 1919. After initial studies at Edinburgh University, George Busby transferred to University College, Dublin, to complete his medical qualifications, and then practised as a doctor in Walthamstow, London (where there is a blue plaque in his honour), before relocating to settle in the Gold Coast in 1929. Through her maternal line, she is a cousin of BBC newscaster Moira Stuart. Her grandfather was Dominica-born George James Christian (1869–1940), a delegate at the First Pan-African Conference, in London, in 1900, who migrated to the Gold Coast in 1902.

Her parents sent their three children to be educated in England, when Busby was five. She and her sister first attended a school in the Lake District, followed by Charters Towers School, an international girls' boarding-school in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. After passing her O-levels there, aged 14, Busby left school at 15, went back to Ghana and took her A-levels at 16, then spent a year at a college in Cambridge so as not to begin university too young. From the age of 17, she studied English at Bedford College, London University, where she edited her college literary magazine, as well as publishing her own poetry. She graduated with a BA Honours degree, at the age of 20. She was married to British jazz musician and educator, Lionel Grigson (1942–1994).

Publishing career

While still at university, she met her future business partner, Clive Allison, at a party in Bayswater Road, and they decided to start a publishing company. After graduating, Busby briefly worked at the Cresset Press – part of the Barrie Group – while setting up Allison and Busby (A & B), whose first books were published in 1967, making her the then youngest publisher as well as the first African woman book publisher in the UK – an achievement she has assessed by saying: "[I]t is easy enough to be the first, we can each try something and be the first woman or the first African woman to do X, Y or Z. But, if it's something worthwhile you don't want to be the only. ...I hope that I can, in any way, inspire someone to do what I have done but learn from my mistakes and do better than I have done."

She was Allison & Busby's Editorial Director for 20 years, publishing many notable authors including Sam Greenlee (author of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the first novel published by A & B, in 1969), C. L. R. James, Buchi Emecheta, Chester Himes, George Lamming, Roy Heath, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Nuruddin Farah, Rosa Guy, Val Wilmer, Colin MacInnes, H. Rap Brown, Julius Lester, Geoffrey Grigson, Edward Blishen, Dermot Healy, Adrian Mitchell, Matthew Sweeney, Jill Murphy, Christine Qunta, Michael Horovitz, Alexandra Kollontai, Gordon Williams, Alan Burns, Carlos Moore, Michèle Roberts, Molefe Pheto, Arthur Maimane, Maurice Nyagumbo, Giles Gordon, Claire Rayner, Clive Sinclair, Mineke Schipper, Chris Searle, Richard Stark, James Ellroy, Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Thomson Davis, B. Traven, Alexis Lykiard, Tom Mallin, Jack Trevor Story, Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, John Clute, Julian Savarin, Ralph de Boissière, Andrew Salkey, Harriet E. Wilson, and Miyamoto Musashi.

Busby was subsequently editorial director of Earthscan (publishing titles by Han Suyin, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, René Dumont, Carolina Maria de Jesus, and others), before pursuing a freelance career as an editor, writer, and critic, from the early 1990s.

Writing, editing and broadcasting

As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian (mainly book reviews or obituaries of artists and activists including Jessica Huntley, Buzz Johnson, Jayne Cortez, Jan Carew, Rosa Guy, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Florynce Kennedy, Barry Reckord, Frank Crichlow, Connie Mark, Glenn Thompson, August Wilson, Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, Geraldine Connor, Binyavanga Wainaina, bell hooks and Biyi Bandele), The Observer, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the New Statesman, and elsewhere, for both the general press and specialist journals.

Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century (2026)

In March 2026, Hamish Hamilton published a collection of Busby's collected writings, titled Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century.