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Hannah Chukwu, assistant editor at PRH imprint Hamish Hamilton, has been announced as a finalist for the 2021 Black British Business Awards in the Arts and Media Rising Star category.
The awards highlight Black professionals from across the United Kingdom who have not only been selected for their outstanding professional achievements, but for the personal work they are doing to defy stereotypes and reshape the business world around them.
Winners for each category, as well as the Black British Business Person of the Year, will be revealed at the Black British Business Awards virtual ceremony, taking place on 7th October. Miya Knights, an author and global content strategist at Poq Commerce, has also been shortlisted in the Arts and Media Senior Leader of the Year category.
In May this year Chukwu was appointed to the joint board of the Creative Industries Federation and Creative England. At Hamish Hamilton she works on literary fiction and non-fiction, working with authors such as Bernardine Evaristo, Zadie Smith and Arundhati Roy. She is an editor for Five Dials magazine, and the series editor for Black Britain: Writing Back. She is also policy and campaigns consultant for the campaign Lit in Colour, run by PRH and the Runnymede Trust, which aims to diversify the English GCSE curriculum. She co-founded the theatre production company Chucked Up Theatre in 2016, and is a trustee at education equality charity The Brilliant Club. In 2021 she won the London Book Fair Trailblazer Award and was named on the EMpower Ethnic Minority Future Leader list.
Knights has over 23 years’ experience as a journalist, editor, publisher, analyst, research director and consultant; she is currently global content strategist for mobile shopping app platform provider Poq. She has co-authored two bestselling books, Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionise Commerce (Kogan Page), which has been translated into 17 languages and will be followed by a second edition this November, and Omnichannel Retail (Kogan Page), co-written with the former deputy c.e.o. of Tesco, Tim Mason.
Sophie Chandauka, executive founder and chair of the Black British Business Awards, said: “After an extraordinarily challenging year, I am thrilled that for the eighth year running we are highlighting the resilience and abundance of brilliant, Black talent in Britain. Our finalists have delivered tremendous commercial value across sectors in volatile markets where entrepreneurs, in particular, have been decimated. They have been strategic advisors to their companies and boards as global corporations are challenged by investors to address systemic racism. Despite the pandemic and social unrest, they are fiercely competitive and remarkably ambitious, creative and commercially savvy, leveraging technology as their differentiator. They are global in their outlook and ambition and represent the very best of being British in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit Europe.”