Joining Vick Hope on this exciting episode of Bookshelfie is Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell. Rebecca is a former elite athlete with a career spanning over 10 years, swimming for both Great Britain and Kenya. She is the first Black woman to swim for the Great Britain team, where she was world number one winning the 50m and 100m breaststroke in 2010.
Not content with just reigning in sport, Rebecca is also a documentary director and producer, a praised essayist, the CEO of the 10,000 Interns Foundation and the founder of NKG, a creative strategy and media agency focused on social change projects. Rebeccca’s searing memoir, These Heavy Black Bones was published in 2024.
In her Bookshelfie episode of the Women’s Prize podcast, the Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient takes us through her 5 most memorable reads written by women, make sure to tune in here.
Honestly, how do you pick your favourite Toni Morrison? I love the surrealist realism of Tar Baby. The paragraphs describing New York are some of the best writing I’ve ever read. Toni’s writing gives me permission to give into myself and what I want, which I think, as a woman, is something we aren’t often encouraged to do or think. I love this book and all of hers with so much intensity.
I read this after my Dad died I was in my early 20s and was very lost, he was an African freedom fighter of the post colonial/apartheid era. A masterclass in storytelling, this book put the pain of a whole continent inside me.
I read this book in New York, I was given it by my best friend when I was really struggling through the hardest section of These Heavy Black Bones. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read and it gave me permission to write about the people I love and accept that the picture I painted of them on the page could never be whole and that that was okay.
When I went out to the states to start my PhD (now paused but not forgotten) I felt so estranged from academia, I was 26 in an African Studies department, teaching, and trying to prove a point to myself (that I could do this very hard thing). I was quickly very disillusioned with the reality of being a professional academic but Sharpe’s writing made me believe in it enough to push through my first few years. Her praxis about being ‘in the wake’, essentially finding a way to exist in tension between the violence and joy of being Black is something I think about pretty much every day.
My best friend from university, who I met in my first term is one of those people who just defines taste, music, art, literature, whatever. She’s the only person I take recommendations from seriously and she gave me this book for my 29th birthday. We have both raged against life a lot and I felt so much of her and us in this insane novel. I read it in Spain, in 3 days and it made me want to change my life, I think I was the worst holiday companion.
