Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi, two recent Cambridge graduates, are soon to become published authors after their book was announced as the first acquisition for Stormzy’s Penguin Random House imprint, #Merky Books, following its launch in July 2018.

Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto for Change, scheduled for release June 27, is the first in a series of titles published in collaboration with the BRIT Award-winning grime MC, and is billed a ‘groundbreaking exploration of the problems of diversity in education’. Kwakye, who became Vice President of the African-Caribbean Society, Captain of Homerton Ladies Football team and the BME Officer for Homerton Union of Students while studying, and Ogunbiyi, who published ‘A letter to my fresher self: Surviving Cambridge as a black girl’ in the university’s independent newspaper in 2017, was featured in Future Leaders magazine, a publication which profiles 100 of the UK’s most outstanding African and African-Caribbean students and new graduates. Upon the announcement of the release, Kwakye and Ogunbiyi commented ‘Diversity and inclusion have become buzzwords, especially in education, but it is time that we had honest conversations about what those two words truly mean, especially for young black girls’.