Discomfort creates great events

I believe that magic happens when you bring together different worlds – and sometimes worlds where you feel out of place.

That might be because I’ve been part of so many. Where are you from? is what I am asked the most when I’m in the UK, the country I was born in and consider home, likely due to my English-Filipina heritage, and my transatlantic accent, the byproduct of attending international school. Moving around – between the UK, Nigeria, Cambodia, Tanzania and Indonesia – meant that books were a rare constant, providing solace as I adapted to changing circumstances. I found stories magical, portals to other worlds, a chance to live other lives.

When I first entered the publishing world, 13 years ago, I certainly felt out of place, as a person of colour, as a career-changer, and without existing connections. Though I didn’t yet have the language or context to articulate or understand why I felt this way, only that I did most of the time. So I was able to ignore this familiar sense of displacement, especially as I was so absorbed in learning all I could about a world I had wanted to be part of since childhood.

With more awareness, I can now embrace existing in liminal spaces. My quest for belonging informs my drive to connect people and build community. I aim to design the kind of events that you could attend alone and at which you could talk to someone new. I have brought together mermaids, hula hoopers and activists, for lightning talks and a Taylor Swift dance routine. I have transformed a coding academy into a Prince-themed purple cake utopia with live music, magic and comedy. My favourite part of any event is seeing people happy and in the moment, and connecting, especially when they might not have had cause to meet otherwise.

Bringing together different worlds is a feature of both the development and programming of Black to the Future, a new Afrofuturistic Festival founded by Irenosen Okojie, which will accompany the British Library’s upcoming exhibition "Fantasy: Realms of Imagination", in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. BTTF is a celebration of Black excellence, uniting storytellers from different industries including arts, culture, gaming, science and technology, and the process of making it has involved a series of connections, traversing space and time, too. Since Irenosen first shared her vision with me in 2020, it has grown and changed, with each contribution, like an amoeba, shifting and expanding as it approaches its final form. Irenoson and I first envisaged it as a 2-3 day event in a single venue – now it’s a multi-venue programme spanning several months. We’ve even gained a third core team member – legendary promoter and Book Slam founder Elliott Jack, who is embedded in the music world, a pioneer of immersive experiences – and my biggest inspiration as an event producer.

As the project has gained momentum, powered by the battery of creative synergy and nurturing friendship, I’ve become emboldened

The shared curiosity between the three of us has influenced the multidisciplinary nature of the programme and a desire to mix worlds, people and spaces in unexpected ways. Our flagship event with the British Library – Genre Marauders, featuring Tade Thompson, Chella Ramanan and Rivers Solomon – encapsulates this desire, with a demystification of genre storytelling across media. Our event series at the retrofuturistic Standard Hotel – Kinetic Discourses – in which two parties discover each other’s realms of expertise through dialogue, kicks off with vocal chameleon and actress Adjoa Andoh and Hodderscape’s SFF editor Calah Singleton. Our film strand at the art deco Garden Cinema launches with a screening of Saul Williams’ sci-fi-rom-com-musical "Neptune Frost", and a conversation between photographer David Kwaw Mensah and Africa-in-Motion festival director Liz Chege on Afro utopias and outlier narratives.

The journey to take BTTF from fantasy to reality has been much longer than we anticipated, but all the richer for it. The rewards have been the brilliant people we’ve met, some of whom were in our networks, many of whom we met through the project, with one introduction leading to another. We’ve encountered visionary venue managers, event programmers, multi-hyphenate creatives and a fair number of our idols.

It hasn’t all been easy. Initially, I felt nervous when I entered grand spaces like the Royal Society of Literature HQ at Somerset House and the British Library to meet with those behind the scenes. But as the project has gained momentum, powered by the battery of creative synergy and nurturing friendship, I’ve become emboldened, standing outside meeting rooms to make contact with strangers, requesting impromptu tours of enticing venues and boarding a hovercraft, in pursuit of partnerships and possibilities. 

My advice to anyone in the books industry thinking about events would be to look outside your own network, your own bubble of influences, and try to meet as many other creatives as you can for real, in-depth conversations that might lead to unexpected collaborations and mashups. Through BTTF, I’ve found that being out of place can lead you somewhere so much better than you could ever have imagined if you’d remained in your comfort zone.

Black to the Future launches in late October.