About Us

WHO WE ARE

The Amplify Project is a social enterprise and a not-for-profit organization.  We are a registered charity.

Our mission is to amplify the canon of Black British and other minoritized writers.

Our aims are:

• To create a series of informative podcasts with Black British and eventually other minoritized writers from the page, stage and screen, with an accompanying website that contextualizes and documents their place in the British canon.
• To document and explore the creative practice, legacy and context of the canon and its place in British society.
• To inform the public, arts organisations, funders and decision makers, artistic peers, students and researchers about the canon and the creative and critical context in which it exists.

Trustees

Arti Prashar OBE, Dermot Daly and Vedrana Velickovic

Arti is a ‘senior’ leader in the arts, theatre director, arts consultant, dramaturg, and community artist. The experience that she brings to the role of Chair is that of lived experience as a British Asian and neurodiversity, driven by injustice.

She is very inspired by The Amplify Project and its founders Pat and Pauline.

Dermot is a director, dramaturg, actor and academic. He works across all media as a practitioner, with an acute focus on those who have been marginalised within the arts in his academic work. He has twice been nominated as Best Director at the Black British Theatre Awards, and is consistently working on various performative and academic projects focussed on new writing and voices that are not routinely platformed. He is proud that The Amplify Project champions and amplifies the voices of writers to broader audiences.

Vedrana is a Principal Lecturer in Literature at the University of Brighton. She is passionate about teaching Black British Literature in its richness and diversity all across all levels of study, including her specialist core MA module ‘Writing Black Britain’. She has co-organised two conferences on Black British and Asian British Writing at Brighton (2014, 2022) and she regularly collaborates with local literary festivals and organisations (The Brighton Book festival, The Coast is Queer, New Writing South, Afrori Books) to platform and bring in marginalised writers to the city. She is also a co-founder of the student-staff DeCol Collective.

The Team

Patricia Cumper and Pauline Walker are the founders of The Amplify Project.  They are both writers and share a fascination with the people, the process, and the art and craft of writing.  They invite Black writers for the stage, page and screen to tell them about themselves, their work, what inspires them and why they write.

The discussions that led to setting up The Amplify Project began before the pandemic, before the summer of George Floyd, before the world assumed its current shape.  Patricia and Pauline both saw similar patterns in the publishing and theatre industries: Publishers saying they couldn’t find Black British writers, who felt that there wasn’t a sufficient market for  the work they were receiving.

They wanted a practical response to those concerns, one that they could shape themselves and which reflected their interests, as writers themselves, in the lives, work and practice of Black British writers, not just when their latest book, play or programme came out but as thinkers and artists in their own right.  So they set up the podcast and accompanying website and have broadened the remit to included minoritized writers.

If you like what you hear, please spread the word and recommend The Amplify Project podcast to your friends and colleagues. All the episodes can be found on your favourite podcast platforms; listen, like, comment and subscribe.