David Olusoga

David Olusoga is a British-Nigerian historian, broadcaster, author, and filmmaker who has become one of the most important and influential public historians in Britain. His work focuses on the history of race, empire, slavery, and the Black experience in Britain, and he brings rigorous scholarship, powerful storytelling, and an unflinching commitment to historical truth to everything he writes and produces. Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1970, Olusoga grew up in the northeast of England. He experienced racism as a child, including an arson attack on his family home, experiences that shaped his determination to uncover and tell the hidden histories of Black people in Britain. Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016), both a book and a landmark BBC television series, traced the history of Black people in Britain from Roman times to the present day. The book won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the Longman-History Today Trustees' Award, and the television series brought this history to a wide audience for the first time. Africa: A Biography of the Continent is among his works exploring the history and cultures of Africa. The World's War examined the role of soldiers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean in the First World War. Civilisations was a major BBC series. Black and British: A Short Essential History made his work accessible to younger readers. Olusoga is a professor of public history at the University of Manchester and has presented numerous television documentaries. He was appointed OBE in 2019. His writing is characterised by meticulous research, a gift for narrative, and a fierce conviction that history belongs to everyone and that the stories that have been excluded from the mainstream deserve to be heard. The audiobook editions of Olusoga's books are compelling and powerful, with narrators matching the authority and passion of his prose. His books and audiobooks are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the full, honest history of Britain and the world.