This is Major: On Diana Ross, Dark Girls and Being Dope

"This is a really edgy book. Lawson says things that may get on people’s nerves… and she really doesn’t care. She gets into the whole woke scenario in a really interesting way, both in real life and on social media, which is as you know a big vehicle for wokeness and social justice warrior-ing. I love the beginning of the book. She talks about how there was no American Girl Doll that was black, but she and her sister were obsessed with their little white, prairie girl. By the time they finally came out with a black American Girl Doll it was quite an anticlimax. She also writes about working in an office where she’s ‘the other black girl’. As you can tell from the title, she’s very in your face. And we wanted to honour that bravery and clarity. “We figured out that the personal was political in the 1970s. Fifty years later, it’s time to let this genre absorb the impact of that insight” We didn’t necessarily want to put out a list of books that everyone has already heard a lot about, have won other prizes, etc. We felt that This Is Major could easily be one that had slipped under the radar, so it’s exciting to lift it up. Like I say: it’s edgy, it’s funny, it’s badass. Because they’re just as interested in exploring issues as they are in telling a story. They need to not be limited by the demands of chronological storytelling. When you start Shayla Lawson’s book with the American Girl Doll essay, you could be reading the beginning of a regular narrative memoir, starting in her childhood. While it does jump around through her autobiography, many of the pieces are topical, as in ‘Black Lives Matter, Yard Signs Matter,’ and ‘Diana Ross Is Major.’ But as with Hong, there’s always autobiography in the mix. And this is why these books used to fall through the cracks. People would say: ‘this isn’t autobiography, it’s cultural commentary.’ But we figured out that the personal was political in the 1970s. Fifty years later, it’s time to let this genre absorb the impact of that insight."