Madeleine Bunting was for many years a columnist for the Guardian, which she joined in 1990. Bunting read History at Cambridge and Politics at Harvard. She is the author of many non-fiction books, including The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre, which won the Portico Prize, and Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
She has also written the novels Island Song and the newly released Ceremony of Innocence.
At the Guardian Bunting tagged ten of the best books about the aftermath of empire, including:
Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V CarbyRead about the other entries on the list.
This book instantly stood out as the winner of the British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan prize last year when I was on the jury. Carby is a professor at Yale, butthis book is deeply personal as she brings academic research and analysis to bear on her family history. In the 18th century, a Lincolnshire farmer’s lad left home to make his fortune as a plantation owner and gave his name, Carby, to generations of mixed-race Jamaicans. In the second world war, her father joined up to fight for the empire, and then married a white British woman. Carby’s account of how her family were pulled apart by the systemic racism and intolerance of mixed-race marriages in the 50s and 60s is utterly shocking; she poignantly portrays how her father, a man of great dignity, had believed in the promises and ideals proclaimed by the British. Carby moves the reader through every possible response to the complex patterns of family lineage under empire.
--Marshal Zeringue
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