17/10/2025
Litfest Autumn Weekend has officially started.
Litfest, Lancaster
Why not book onto this event where Rebecca Novell will be in conversation with Malik Al Nasir.
Rebecca Joy Novell is the co-founder of Lancaster Black History Group. She is the County Council lead for refugee resettlement and has a passionate interest in forced migration.
Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool to mixed parentage, with a white mother and a black father. He is an author, film maker, performance poet, and an award-winning academic from Liverpool.
Tickets still available just click link below to book
The perfect event for UK Black History Month: on Sunday 19th October at 3:30pm, join us at Lancaster Library to hear Malik Al Nasir in conversation with Rebecca Joy Novell talking about his fascinating exploration of his ancestry in SEARCHING FOR MY SLAVE ROOTS!
Book now and browse the full programme: https://geni.us/MalikAN
‘I suspect that in ten years’ time, we’ll look back at the study of slavery and try to remember what it was like before we’d heard of the Sandbach Tinne dynasty. That we’ll struggle to imagine how we tried to understand Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade without this huge dynastic epic at the centre of it’ -David Olusoga
Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool, a mixed-race kid formerly known as Mark Watson – he changed his name when he converted to Islam in early adulthood. Bemused by memories of racist chants baying for him to ‘go back to where you came from’ – he came from Liverpool after all – he began to look in detail into his ancestry. This book is the result and charts the twists and turns of his journey into the past, exploring an untold chapter in both Black and British history. Largely set in between Liverpool, Glasgow and Demerara and Berbice, Searching for my Slave Roots is a quest for identity, through the genealogy of Malik’s family and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of humans, all to feed our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff: sugar.
Searching for my Slave Roots unravels not just the legacies of enslavement but also plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty that he himself is descended from through the exploitation of those they enslaved.
