There are many unsung heroic people around the world doing their best to change things for the better. Just using the word ‘change’ is often a challenge to those in authority – who have shaped the world to best suit themselves and their peer groups, and those who seek change are mostly those who have been marginalized by those very groups of elites.

Around the world, traditions and the laws that were designed to repress and exclude are being challenged, and the catalysts for change are mostly women, although I guess most of them are too modest to characterize themselves as heroic. 

It is well documented that the British creative arts scene is heavily populated by the middle and upper-middle classes and that the working class contingent makes up as little as 8%  of actors, musicians and writers. The reasons for this under-representation of the vast bulk of British people are manifold, but it’s well documented that when it comes to the arts, people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are not on the same starting line as their better-off peers, and if the artist is black or brown they often start the race with their feet tethered together – that’s if they are allowed access to the track in the first place. And a generation ago, that’s just how the world of book publishing looked from my viewpoint but I was fortunate enough to encounter a heroic figure named Rosemarie Hudson in 1999.

A black woman from Jamaica, Rosemarie has a rod of iron running through her that makes her a formidable character. She was by no means the first person to start chipping away at white, Oxbridge monolith, otherwise known as British publishing, but she worked her hammer and chisel more effectively than most. In 1996 she established a publishing house in London to promote talented writers of colour called BlackAmber Books and gave an outlet for the creative talents of authors such as award-winning Alex Wheatle (Brixton Rock), Patricia Cumper (One Bright Child) and Cauvery Madhavanan (Paddy Indian) to name just a few. 

By early 1999, after three and a half years of receiving rejection letters from just about every publisher and agent in the Writers’ Handbook, a chink of light finally came through the letterbox. It was another rejection from a publisher who had asked to see the full manuscript after I had initially sent a synopsis and first two chapters. Someone had actually taken the trouble to read it and not only that, she had liked it very much and described it as thrilling, thought-provoking and well laid out  . . . But my novel’s content was not something that would fit into their list. However, in her opinion, it did deserve to be published and the person who might take it on was a woman named Rosemarie Hudson.

‘Fit into’ – those two words stayed with me for a long time. The British, or more precisely the class of British people who populated the book industry back then, always had a well-earned reputation for civility and good manners and would never come clean about why my novel What Goes Around did not fit into any of their lists.  Only once did the mask slip when an agent called its contents potentially ‘inflammatory’. I was a year into making my submissions to publishers when the IRA London Docklands bomb went off, only to be followed a few months later with the destruction of Manchester city centre with the biggest bomb detonated in Britain since WWII and with hindsight, it is clear that my novel which features a young black man becoming involved with an IRA operation in England may have – understandably – struck too many raw nerves. But of course, my story, told through the conflicted character of Robbie Walker, is about much more than that, and luckily for me, Rosemarie Hudson had not only the insight but also the courage to put What Goes Around into print.

A woman of strong opinions and values, Rosemarie remains a personal hero of mine, and many of today’s writers from backgrounds similar to mine owe a debt of gratitude to her and the others who, in the twentieth century, began the fight for those writers who found themselves relegated to the margins. Through her company Hope Road Publishing, which she founded in 2010, Rosemarie continues to use her literary hammer and chisel to shape publishing so it more resembles the people who inhabit Britain – and may she long continue swinging that hammer.