Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and academic whose work serves as a great jumping-off point and deep dive into matters of race in Britain, the United States and beyond, as well as delving into a range of subjects that include knife crime, gay marriage and Brexit.
July 29, 2020Profile written by Ricky Monahan-Brown, Trustee and Writers at Risk Committee Co-Chair, Scottish PEN
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and academic whose work serves as a great jumping-off point and deep dive into matters of race in Britain, the United States and beyond, as well as delving into a range of subjects that include knife crime, gay marriage and Brexit. His many honours include the award of the Society of Editors Press Award for the 2018 Broadsheet Feature Writer of the Year. He was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people in the UK from African/African-Caribbean descent in the 2020 Powerlist.
Born in Hertfordshire in 1969 to Barbadian parents, it is particularly apposite that Scottish PEN should highlight Gary Younge’s work as part of our Amplify Black Voices project, given that his journey to holding the post of Professor of Sociology at Manchester University and numerous honorary doctorates and fellowship included a stint as a student at Heriot-Watt University in the late 1980s. As The Guardian’s US correspondent, he lived in and wrote from New York and then Chicago before returning to Britain and London.
His books include No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the American South, Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States, Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?, The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream, and in 2016, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives, in which he picked a day a random and told the stories of ten young lives lost to gun violence, none of which made the national news. Another Day in the Death of America was shortlisted for The Orwell Prize, The Jhalak Prize, The CWA Gold Dagger For Non-Fiction and The Bread And Roses Award.
Gary Younge’s work draws connections between Britain and the United States, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and present-day race relations, and reaches out to consider the impact of different types of power and privilege in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ireland, France and beyond. His writing has been variously described as formidably intelligent and tenacious and deeply affecting. In The Herald, David Pratt wrote that Another Day in the Death of America is a magnificent piece of reportage… written beautifully with elegance and heartfelt compassion.
Gary Younge now lives in London with his wife and two children.
Amplify Black Voices: View related posts here
Ricky Monahan Brown is a Trustee of Scottish PEN, and Co-Chair of the Writers at Risk Committee. He is the author of the memoir Stroke: A 5% chance of survival from Sandstone Press, which was one of The Scotsman’s Scottish Books of 2019. He is the co-founder and curator of the multiple award-winning irregular night of live spoken word and musical entertainment, Interrobang?! which has served as a vehicle to facilitate one of the strands of Scottish PEN’s Many Voices project and has supported Scottish PEN’s work in opposing pervasive surveillance.