Michael Donkor (born 1985) is a British author and English teacher based in London. He is represented by

Blake Friedmann This is a list of the major UK literary agencies, by order of the year of their establishment, including selected notable clients. Literary agencies See also * List of largest UK book publishers References {{DEFAULTSORT:Uk Literary Agenci ...

and Fourth Estate.

Early life and education

Donkor was born in London to a Ghanaian household. He completed his bachelor's degree in English at Wadham College, Oxford, as well as a master's in Creative Writing at University of London. At the University of Oxford he was one of only 21 black students in his year. At the University of London he was supervised by

Andrew Motion Sir Andrew Motion (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio reco ...

Career

In 2010 Donkor trained as an English teacher at the UCL Institute of Education, and began his teaching career at Esher College. He formally taught at St Paul's Girls' School. He has left his job there (as of 2022) and is pursuing a career of writing in Portugal, Lisbon. In 2014 he was chosen by the

National Centre for Writing The National Centre for Writing, formerly Writers' Centre Norwich, is a literature development agency and national centre for writing based in Norwich, England. It led the successful bid for Norwich to be granted the UNESCO City of Literature titl ...

for their mentoring programme, through which he met mentor Daniel Hahn and agent Juliet Pickering. He was described by HarperCollins as a "powerful new British literary voice". '' The Observer'' selected him as a ''New Face of Fiction'' in January 2018. He is inspired by Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Toni Morrison.

Hold

Fourth Estate gained publishing rights to Donkor's ''Hold'', which was published in July 2018. It follows the stories of three teenage girls from Kumasi, Ghana, to Brixton, London, in 2002, and has been described as a coming-of-age novel. Donkor chose to set ''Hold'' in 2002 as it marks the summer he was applying to study English at university. ''Hold'' was longlisted for the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Donkor, Michael 1985 births Living people British writers Schoolteachers from London Alumni of Wadham College, Oxford Alumni of the University of London English people of Ghanaian descent Black British writers 21st-century British male writers