My name is Zakiya. I'm a PhD candidate in Literature looking at newsprint archives from Caribbean writers in England with Caribbean Literary Heritage. I am myself, a writer and journalist, who grew up in the Caribbean and moved to Bristol as an adult. In many ways, my project has caused me to consider my own identity because I was born in London but did not really identify with it; I left before I can remember. The more I got into my research, the more I recognised that the story I am looking at is the story of my family - three of my grandparents would be considered a part of the Windrush generation, my parents grew up in the thick of the 70s London - these are things I never ever considered while living in Jamaica.

I am here to bring light to the hard-working journalists who did the important job of documenting the past. Their work has allowed me to find out more about myself. My research focuses on West Indian journalists who lived and worked in England during the 1950s - 1970s. I am interested in the newspaper editors and journalists who were among the well-known literary champions of the Windrush era and beyond. Though desperately underfunded, a circuit of immigrant journalists had existed alongside the much more popular prose and poetry publications which students of Caribbean literature will come to know. The storytellers and mythmakers flourished during this time, but the journalists too were there. Black writers and editors were forced to create their own sources of news to report on issues that affected immigrant populations and to counter the one-sided narrative painted by popular press.

Here are a few journalists and publications that have caught my interest: