Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson’s critically acclaimed memoir, Negroland – “a small region of Negro America where residents are sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty” – looks back on her childhood and the black bourgeois upbringing that ‘made and maimed me’.

With privilege though came exception, and she recalls her reckoning with the strictures and demands of her upbringing at crucial historical moments – the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America. She charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times.

Hosted by Marie-Louise Muir.