Jacaranda Twenty in 2020, Fane Online Book Festival

The online festival will explore the Black experience through the work of the authors. Book lovers will be able to attend sessions including ‘Empowering Black women through Romance Writing’, ‘Between Two Worlds: Exploring Mixed-Race Identity’ and ‘The Poets of #TwentyIn2020’. There will also be conversations with Stella Oni, the author of Deadly Sacrifice, who’ll discuss being a Black female crime writer and Shola von Reinhold  whose book, Lote, investigates the censoring of Black queer voices in the arts and literature.

The event pays homage to the Twentyin2020 initiative, a first of its kind in the UK. Twenty titles by 20 Black Britons were published by Jacaranda Books in just one year. Covering adult fiction, nonfiction and poetry, the series aims to normalise the presence of diverse literature and to embed the voices of emerging Black authors as valued members of British culture and society.

A portion of the profits from this event will be donated to the event’s charity of choice, Black Cultural Archives (BCA). BCA is the UK’s only heritage centre dedicated to collecting, preserving and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain.

Between Two Worlds: Exploring Mixed-Race Identity

Esuantsiwa Jane Goldsmith and Katy Massey discuss their vivid memoirs, shining a light on their experiences of navigating class, race and identity. Goldsmith's The Space Between Black and White and Massey's Are We Home Yet? trace their journeys as mixed-race, working-class women, brought up by their white mothers, as well as exploring the North-South divide. The event is chaired by Susan Dale, the founder of HaluHalo, an online platform established in 2016 to explore and celebrate the mixed-race identity in all its forms.

The event is sponsored by HaluHalo