David Olusoga

David Adetayo Olusoga (born January 1970)^[1] is a British Nigerian popular historian, writer, broadcaster and filmmaker. He has presented a number of historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.^[2] His historical subjects have focused on military history, race and slavery.

Biography

David Olusoga was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and British mother.^[3] As a young boy, Olusoga migrated to the UK with his mother and grew up in Newcastle, one of very few non-white people living on a council estate. By the time he was 14, the National Front had attacked his house on more than one occasion, requiring police protection for him and his family. They were eventually forced to leave as a result of the racism.^[4][5] He later attended the University of Liverpool to study the history of slavery.^[6]

Realising that black people were much less visible in the media and historically, including in the Ladybird Book of Roman Britain, Olusoga became a producer of history programmes after university, working from 2005 on programmes such as Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich, The Lost Pictures of Eugene Smith and Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner?.^[7]

Subsequently he became a television presenter, beginning in 2014 with The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, about the Indian, African and Asian troops who fought in the First World War, followed by several other documentaries and appearances on BBC One television's The One Show. In 2015 it was announced that he would co-present Civilisations, a sequel to Kenneth Clark's 1969 television documentary series Civilisation, alongside the historians Mary Beard and Simon Schama.^[4]

Also a writer, Olusoga is the author of the 2016 book Black and British: A Forgotten History, which was awarded both the Longman-History Today Trustees Award 2017 and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2017. His other books include The World’s War, which won First World War Book of the Year in 2015, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (2011) which he co-authored with Casper Erichsen, and Civilisations (2018). He was also a contributor to the Oxford Companion to Black British History, and has written for The Guardian, The Observer and BBC History Magazine.^[8]

Filmography

• Civilisations (two of nine episodes, "First Contact" and "The Cult of Progress") (2018)
• A House Through Time (2018)
• Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)
• The One Show (various episodes)
• Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners (2015)
• Fighting for King and Empire: Britain's Caribbean Heroes (2015)
• The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (2014)

Books

• Civilisations: First Contact / The Cult of Progress (Profile Books, 2018); ISBN 978-1781259979
• Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016); ISBN 978-1447299745
• The World's War (Head of Zeus, 2015); ISBN 978-1781858981
• The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (Faber and Faber, 2011); ISBN 978-0571231423

Awards and honours

• 2017: Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters, University of Liverpool^[9]
• 2017: PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for Black and British^[10]
• 2017: Longman-History Today Trustees Award for Black and British^[11]
• 2016: Specialist Factual BAFTA, BAFTA TV Awards for Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners^[12]
• 2015: Royal Historical Society Public History Prize for Broadcasting for Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (BBC History)
• 2015: World War One Book of the Year at the Paddy Power Political Book Awards for The World's War^[13]

References

External links

• Arifa Akbar, "David Olusoga: ‘There’s a dark side to British history, and we saw a flash of it this summer’" (interview), The Guardian, 4 November 2016.