Under Bageye’s Watchful Eye

About Colin

Colin Grant is an author, historian and BBC radio producer; he has also worked as a script editor and produced several radio drama-documentaries. He has written and directed plays, including The Clinic, based on the lives of the photojournalists, Tim Page and Don McCullin.

Grant is also an associate fellow at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, Warwick University, and a judge on the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

The son of Jamaican emigrants to the UK in the late 1950s, Grant has written a trilogy of books that observes African Caribbean life in the 20th century.

His first book was an acclaimed biography of Marcus Garvey, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; his second, hailed as one of the best music books for 2011, I&I: The Natural Mystics – Marley, Tosh and Wailer, is the first group biography of the Wailers, although it was as much a social history of Jamaica. And, his third, a departure from his non-fiction writing, Bageye at the Wheel, is a comic memoir based on his father, Clinton George ‘Bageye’ Grant, and growing up in 1970s Luton – at the time, a provincial town with few West Indians.