At the Creative Access book club, we’ve closed the final chapter on 2024 having turned an incredible 2,941 pages along the way. We’ve welcomed our community of mentees, interns and alumni to eight chatty meetings to cover an incredible range of new fiction and non-fiction by authors from historically under-represented backgrounds. As always, a huge thank you goes to our partners in the publishing industry for providing book copies and, often, a place to talk about them over the year!
Here’s what we read in 2024:
- My Friends by Hisham Matar (Penguin Viking)
- The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa by Stephen Buoro (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Manny & the Baby by Varaidzo (Scribe UK)
- We Were Girls Once by Aiwanose Odafen (Simon & Schuster)
- Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang (HarperCollins)
- Mongrel by Hanako Footman (Footnote Press, Bonnier Books)
- Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Faber)
- Happiness Falls by Angie Kim (Faber)
This year we sat down to interview three authors about their new books: Stephen Buoro, Hanako Footman and Aniefiok Ekpoudom (who also happens to be a Creative Access alumnus himself!). We worked with seven different publishers – from independent publishers Faber, Scribe, Bloomsbury Publishing and Bonnier Books to major publishers Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House – to provide 260 copies of books to read who then came to talk about the book as a group.
“Loved it. The book really made me think about how oral history is collected.” – one reader on Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (pictured above).
As always, our book picks spanned many genres united by the common theme of being written by authors from marginalised backgrounds. Highlights included finally getting our hands on the hooky and relentless thriller Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang (someone at the event said “this book made me fall in love with reading again”) and diving into the social history of British rap and grime with Aniefiok Ekpoudom with his non-fiction book Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain.
And a special shoutout to Hanako Footman for filling us in about her Waterstones Debut Prize-nominated Mongrel on a Zoom call in September. The novel shifts between three women Mei, Yuki and Haruka as they navigate life across different countries and generations. “I loved the book!” one book club attendee told us. “The characters were compelling, and the interwoven narratives were so lyrically written that it sometimes felt like reading poetry.”
Our cosy Q&A Zoom call with author and actor extraordinaire Hanako Footman, discussing her first novel Mongrel.
The Creative Access book club is possible because of our publishing partners that provide copies and often a space to talk about the book, so a huge shout out to both them and our wonderful community of readers who brought these discussions to life. We’re excited for more page turners in 2025!
We’re always looking for new book club partners. As well as discussing the book, we can organise a giveaway across our socials and make sure you get plenty of coverage across our community. If you’d like to nominate a title by an author from an historically under-represented community (and you can post out 25-35 copies to attendees) please get in touch at theo@creativeaccess.org.uk.
