Ferdinand Dennis

Ferdinand Dennis (born 1956) is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s. Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background (a region probably marked more than any other by movements and migration), Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots. This is foregrounded in much of his fictional work, notably his most recent and ambitious novel to date, Duppy Conqueror (1998), a novel which moves from 1930s Jamaica to postwar London and Liverpool, to Africa. Similarly, Dennis’ non-fiction centres on journeying rather than arrival, from Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988) to Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (2000)."

Ferdinand Dennis was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in north Paddington, London, where he and his siblings – two brothers and a sister – relocated in 1964 to join their parents.

Dennis read sociology at Leicester University, after which he was employed as an educational researcher in Handsworth, Birmingham. He studied for a Master's degree at Birkbeck College, London University. He received a Wingate Scholarship in 1995. He has lectured in Nigeria, and from 2003 to 2011 taught Creative and Media Writing courses at Middlesex University.

As a broadcaster, he has written and presented numerous talks and documentaries for BBC Radio 4 – such as the series After Dread and Anger (1989),Journey Round My People, for which he travelled in West Africa, Back To Africa (1990) and Work Talk (1991–92, produced by Marina Salandy-Brown) – as well as a television programme about Africa for Channel 4.

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