Morgan Parker and Georgina Lawton

‘I do feel compelled to represent my particular experience as a Black woman - but I know that’s not everyone’s experience, and I’m trying to make a point that it isn’t, and that if you’re looking for that, you’re not going to find it with me – and that that is not my job … It’s unrealistic to think that there is a particular Black American experience that each person needs to represent.’

There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé (Corsair) won Morgan Parker a wide UK readership; Magical Negro takes and expands on the achievement of that first collection, dealing as it does with objectification, loneliness, stereotyping and the stubbornness of ancestral trauma. Danez Smith has called Parker ‘one of this generation’s best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes all of us, up to impossible lights’.

Parker read from Magical Negro, and was in conversation with Georgina Lawton, journalist and essayist, who writes for the Guardian and gal-dem magazine.