Books by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell

“Rebecca was the first black woman to represent Team GB, the British Olympic team, in the pool. Swimming is quite a difficult sport to write about. It’s pretty repetitive. It’s quite good fun at the Olympics when you’ve got a raucous crowd and you can hear the commentary over the top, and all the passion that a big sporting occasion brings. But if you strip it back, it’s relentlessly dull. It’s backwards and forwards and you can’t see the face of the person competing. They’re hidden by their goggles and the water. You’re just guessing what they might be thinking or feeling. What Rebecca does is she turns all that repetitiveness and the tough training into a form of poetry. There are passages where she’ll write about the relentlessness I’ve just described, but it sounds gorgeous. It might sound painful, but in a poetic way. She’s a black face in a sea of white faces at her college. There is the prejudice that ‘black people can’t swim’, that she has to deal with. She finds it very tough discovering her own identity in a strange world, whilst also trying to think like an elite athlete.” Read more...

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