Hamish Hamilton lands Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid's memoir

Hamish Hamilton has landed Turner Prize-winning artist and curator Lubaina Himid’s memoir, edited by Dr Omar Kholeif.  

Editorial director Hermione Thompson and publishing director Simon Prosser bought world rights to Do You Want An Easy Life?, directly from the authors, with Thompson to edit alongside Kholeif. Hamish Hamilton will publish as a hardback, e-book and audiobook in spring 2026. 

Himid was born in Zanzibar in 1954 but left the island as an infant, following the unexpected tragic death of her father. She grew up in London and was closely involved with the Blk Art Group through the 1980s, organising seminal exhibitions of Black women artists and campaigning for visibility, space and funding for work that was largely ignored or stifled in Britain at the time.

In 2017, she became the first woman of colour ever to win the Turner Prize, at the time the oldest recipient in the prize’s history. She was elected to the Royal Academy of Art in 2018 and was awarded a CBE in the same year. Her work has been exhibited widely across Europe, including in a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2021, as well as in North America, Africa and Asia, and this spring she has major solo shows scheduled in New York, Texas and Sharjah, UAE. 

Do You Want an Easy Life?, Himid’s first trade book, developed in collaboration with Kholeif, is “conceived as an artwork in itself”. The publisher said: “This innovative memoir in text and images will draw inspiration from decades of Himid’s writing, poems and letters – to correspondents real and imagined – as well as incorporating a suite of new drawings which serve as entry points into the distinct periods of her life and career. It will explore her myriad influences, from opera to textile, literature to popular music, and trace the evolution of her artistic practice and the ideas, people and experiences that have shaped it. Himid will reflect on assembling a creative life as a Black woman in Britain over four decades, through artistic community and activist collaboration.” 

Himid said: “I want to tell a quite particular story, animated through a series of drawings, of how and why my work is made. The places and spaces, histories and sounds which haunt the narratives inside my projects will be revisited to reveal personal moments showing how the way I have navigated my way through this life has affected my political and creative decisions. It will record which artists, writers, musicians, lovers, curators, and family members have been influential; a tightly woven basket full of wild patterned objects but in the form of a book.” 

Kholeif added: “Lubaina Himid’s art and life have served as one the primary reference points in my own life and work. Indeed, bridging that gap between life and art is one of Himid’s most magnificent talents. I am deeply moved by the generous dialogue with Hamish Hamilton thus far, who have given this project, and us, a publishing home. Together, we will work to reveal to as broad as possible an audience, how Lubaina’s way of seeing the world, has not only altered the course of history, but how it will inevitably shape the way that we come to understand our present and future.” 

Thompson commented: “Lubaina Himid has made a profound and lasting mark on the art world. Her work is incredibly generous – in its imaginative reach, its attentiveness to human detail, its invitations to reconsider and understand differently – and she extends the same spirit of generosity to those she works with, as a passionate advocate for the voices of others and for the collective good. All of us at Hamish Hamilton are delighted to become her publishers, to encounter her essential perspective through a new medium, and to share that work with readers around the world.”