Zami: A New Spelling of my Name

One of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive

A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles - through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde’s story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet’, it changed the literary landscape.

‘Her work shows us new ways to imagine the world … so many themes of Audre’s work have endured’ Renni Eddo Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

‘I came across Audre Lorde’s Zami, and I cried to think how lucky I was to have found her. She was an inspiration’ Jackie Kay