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Tomiwa Owolade Profile
Tomiwa Owolade

@tomowolade

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Columns and essays in various publications. Judge on 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Author of This is Not America. Contact: tomowolade @gmail .com

London
Joined October 2015
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
This tweet has received stinging criticism from many African, West Indian, and black British people - who point out that black Americans do not have a monopoly on the experience of black people around the world. Who knew?
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Jemele Hill
4 years
No one. Absolutely not a fucking soul. Nary a person. Adele:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
Black British people have more in common with white British people than they do with black people across the rest of the world. My 'take' on the Ngozi Fulani / Lady Susan Hussey affair (with a bit of Harry and Meghan mixed in).
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Wow. She went in.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
5 years
@Nigel_Farage Hi Nigel. My six year old son Garibaldi would like to write letters to politicians too, but he is too busy translating The Upanishads into English and finalising his PhD thesis at Cambridge.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
For @unherd today, I have written a piece in defence of Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, and against decolonising the curriculum:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
There's something profoundly wrong with a list of 100 Great Black Britons that doesn't include Trevor Phillips, CLR James, Zadie Smith, Shirley Bassey, Trevor McDonald, any black footballers, a few others. Yet includes Munroe Bergdorf and Kehinde Andrews.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
This is my favourite piece of writing from Judith Butler. So beautifully written. It inspires me every day.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
It is starting to look real
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
11 months
I'm delighted that my debut book This is Not America has been named as a @thetimes book of the year!
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
I'm delighted to announce that from next month I'll be a contributing writer at the @NewStatesman . I'll be writing columns, book reviews, and essays.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
I'm delighted to announce I've been made a Contributing Editor at @unherd .
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
The river basins of Africa
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
I graduated last week from UCL! (Four years after completing my MA in English).
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Emperor's Clothes' is a great children's story. It shows how we can collude in other people's delusions in order to maintain our social status; and how difficult it is to get out of embarrassing spots, as to do so would be to admit a terrible error.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
For @unherd today, I've written about the response to George Floyd's death. (It's a hors d'oeuvres for my book, which will be out next year).
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
I am delighted to finally reveal the front cover of my book This is Not America. Many thanks to the cover designer @jodi_hunt . The book is out on June 22. You can pre-order it here:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
I never fail to be shocked by those who imply some equivalence between "offensive cartoons" and chopping someone's head because of "offensive cartoons".
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
James Baldwin wrote this when he was 22:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
The first physical copy of my book This is Not America. Out 22 June. You can pre-order it here:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
What language did Christopher Columbus speak?
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
I am surprised and delighted that a letter I wrote on an angry impulse two years ago has been published by a very distinguished academic journal!
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
@alexvtunzelmann You went to a fee-paying school in Brighton, not a state school in inner-city London.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
5 years
This image - from a New Year's Eve night in Manchester a couple of years ago - is the great British tableau vivant of this decade.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
I'm absolutely thrilled to announce I'm writing a book entitled 'This is Not America'. It will be published by @AtlanticBooks in 2023. Many thanks to my agent @tobymundy and to Mike Harpley from Atlantic Books.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
81 year old female novelist tweets: "Trans rights? Yes. Toxic in-your-face-activism? No". For that she's had her home address shared online and recieved abuse like "suck my dick bitch"; "Margaret Atwood can eat shit and die". Yet it's GC feminists who support violent movements?
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
I'm absolutely delighted to announce that I've won this year's RSL Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction. Many thanks to the judges and the St Aubyn family.
@RSLiterature
Royal Society of Literature
3 years
Huge congrats to Tomiwa Owolade ( @tomowolade ), our first 2021 #GilesStAubyn Award winner 👏 Here’s Tomiwa discussing his winning book, 'This is Not America', with judge #GwenAdshead ⬇️
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
History is complex; not a morality play. And this means the discourse about race in this country and elsewhere ought to reflect, rather than obviate, this complexity.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
5 years
I would be surprised if I read a worse thread in 2020 than this.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding." - Milan Kundera. RIP.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Today is my 25th birthday 😊
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
James Baldwin on why he stopped hating Shakespeare.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
Today is my 26th Birthday, which I think means my dreams of becoming a professional footballer are finally, finally over.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
I'm going to be on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Across the Red Line' tomorrow morning at 9am. I'll be discussing the influence of American race discourse in Britain. It'll be my first ever broadcast appearance, so do forgive any verbal infelicities....
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
5 months
I've written a Times column about why we should not try to infer someone's ideology from their racial background:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
My first time appearing on BBC Television!
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Today is the 10th anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens. Everyone has been writing about him recently. Here's my 2 cents for @unherd :
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
I've written a piece for @unherd about antisemitism, Labour, and the problems with a structural definition of racism.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
It has not sunk in yet.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
@alexvtunzelmann Independent and creative thinking do not come out of vacuums. They need to be supported by an underlying structure. Many kids in state schools have dysfunctional family lives and are educated in crowded schools. They need discipline and structure to realise their potential.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
This article neatly illustrates the fashionable but pronvincial attitide many people now have on race and culture. Last week I was speaking on the phone to an Igbo friend of my dad. My family is Yoruba. But my dad's friend mispronounced my name.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
Young men should watch videos of Macron rather than Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
@AlexTaylorNews
Alex Taylor
2 years
Here's the extract of Macron being interviewed on @France2tv yesterday by journalists with autistic spectrum - this time with English s/t 👇 Amazing TV 👏 @JournalPapotin @EmmanuelMacron
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
Thanks to all who came to my launch last night. It was incredible. More pics to follow soon.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
Still feels like a dream.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
I still think about this Kwame Anthony Appiah piece on the issue of "lived experience"
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
It is also ironic for black Americans to complain about cultural appropriation because as Ralph Ellison, one of the greatest black American writers of the last century, put it: American culture is a striking example of cultural admixture. From this essay:
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
I've never interacted with him before.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
James Joyce once said that red wine tastes like liquefied beefsteak and white wine tastes like electricity.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
But Churchill was a racist though.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Teju Cole on Caravaggio. This is wonderful writing.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
My mother doesn't have a twitter account, but she checks this website regularly to see what latest thing I've posted. With that in mind: hi mum.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
@LittleHardman I wonder if she's also forbidden the book to be translated into Arabic, Mandarin and Farsi.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Saul Bellow once asked: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?". To which a writer called Ralph Wiley responded: "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, unless you find profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership".
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Me in my element. Am I a cliche?
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
No comment...
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
Casual picture of Eartha Kitt at Paddington station in 1960
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
For @unherd today I've written about Bukayo Saka, Christianity, pizza, colonialism, and London.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Thank you to everyone who's read my work this year. It means a lot.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
Great end to my weekend: my debut book This is Not America is now no.185 on Amazon UK list of bestselling books. And no. 1 in three categories.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
@OzKaterji Oz, I have so much respect and admiration for your work. But you have come across very badly today. I am tempted to say something cliched like 'I hope you reflect on this in time', but that would be patronising to you. So I'll be straight: you have acted appallingly today.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
6 months
I'm tremendously excited to now have copies of the paperback of my book This is Not America. Paperback is out May 2.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
You can't make this stuff up.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Still proud of these boys
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
Many young white people in London speak in Multicultural London English - composite of cockney, Afro-Caribbean and African intonations. Would be odd to be upset at someone dressing up in West Indian garb but brush over the fact that using the word "ting" is part of how they talk
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
Regarding David Starkey, I am reminded of Maya Angelou's line: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Thoughts and prayers to all the people who thought they could miss the first five minutes of the game
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
@alexvtunzelmann Well, breaking rules in a privately educated setting is probably more likely to set you up in life than doing so so in state comp. But who knows?
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
In 1922 Winston Churchill bought Chartwell, his country house in Kent, for £5,000. That is £233,802 in today's money.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
9 months
I've written a column for the Times about why adults should not be proud of loving superhero films and YA fiction.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
From an old coke ad...
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
6 months
My first time using a film camera. From a recent trip to Cornwall.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Only do this to me if you're Hot.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
I like the French expression "entre chien et loup": between dog and wolf. It's used to refer to dusk, because that's the point at which you can't distinguish between the day and night, the dog and wolf.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
Amusing and revealing from Philip Larkin. From a Paris Review interview.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
Sex is a strong mobiliser for radical politics
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
7 months
For the Times, I've written about why when we think of 'diversity' we need to acknowledge region and class.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
This is interesting from Kwame Anthony Appiah on the limits of presuming cultures belong to races. I think it is relevant to the cultural appropriation debate.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Robin DiAngelo's new book, NICE RACISM: HOW PROGRESSIVE WHITE PEOPLE PERPETUATE RACIAL HARM, is out this week. I've written a review of it for @unherd :
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Michel Houellebecq, bless him, can't be parodied.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
2 years
A Frenchman lighting Winston Churchill's cigar in liberated France.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
Frederick Douglass on Ulysses Grant: “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior".
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
What does English sound like to people who don't understand English? In response to the popularity of American songs in 1960s Italy, an Italian singer called Adriano Celentano made a song which sounds like English but is actually nonsense.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
Birthday lunch at Som Saa in Spitalfields with my family.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
There has been a lot of discussion about diversity and inclusion in academia over the past 18 months, but if you are an intelligent and ambitious person, and don't come from a family with intergenerational wealth, why would you choose to go into academia?
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
3 years
Andrew Sullivan describing what it's like to inject himself with synthetic testosterone. (h/t: @robkhenderson )
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
This doesn't seem like a contradiction to me....
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
4 years
I've got at least 3 relatives called 'Femi', so it's been strange for me to see one particular donkeyish individual has acquired celebrity-like mononym status with that name.
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@tomowolade
Tomiwa Owolade
1 year
James Wood on Martin Amis. Very interesting.
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