The Strangers

'Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book' - Bernardine Evaristo

Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.
He tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa, is is an exploration of identity and race, nominated for an Orwell Prize in 2006

Soon Comes Night, is an essay published in Granta and printed in The Observer, in which Eshun explores the impact of race and discrimination on the psyche.