18 October 2023
This Black History Month, we’re showcasing some of our award-winning and eye-opening non-fiction from Black female authors. Discover Tiya Miles’ Baillie Gifford Prize-longlisted history, Emma Dabiri’s rebellious look at beauty, and Dr Annabel Sowemimo’s vital exploration of race and healthcare. Look no further for unmissable non-fiction to dive into this month and beyond…
What are you reading for Black History Month? Let us know at @ProfileBooks on X and @profile.books on Instagram.
All That She Carried by Tiya Miles
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.
How does one uncover the lives of people who, in their day, were considered property? Harvard historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward. All That She Carried gives us history as it was lived, a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds.
Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty by Emma Dabiri
From the bestselling author of What White People Can Do Next.
What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our ‘defects’, according to society’s ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled, are imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing.
This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system. Offering alternative ways of seeing beauty, drawing on other cultures, worldviews, times, and places – to reconnect with our birthright and find the inherent joy in our disobedient bodies.
Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo
A FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023
A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST SUMMER BOOK OF 2023
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are all too aware of the urgent health inequalities that plague our world. But these inequalities have always been urgent: modern medicine has a colonial and racist history.
Here, in an essential and searing account, Annabel Sowemimo unravels the colonial roots of modern medicine. Tackling systemic racism, hidden histories and healthcare myths, Sowemimo recounts her own experiences as a doctor, patient and activist.
This book will reshape how we see health and medicine – forever.