Johny Pitts
Great Britain
Born in 1987, Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer, and journalist. The son of a Black musician and a white steelworker, he grew up in the 1980s in Sheffield in northern England. He is a co-founder of the online journal ‘Afrøpean’. For his book-length essay Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, Pitts traveled through Europe and created a multifaceted portrait of the realities of Black European—Afropean—life. This book is at once a travel journal and a photo-essay, but first and foremost, it is a report on the present by someone trained in the art of precise observation. It is also a complex exploration of Afropean Europe. Johny Pitts has been recognized with multiple awards for his engagement, including the 2021 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding and the 2021 European Essay Prize. In the spring semester of 2024, he held the Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professorship at the University of Bern. His seminar, titled ‘The B-Side: Bootlegs and the Subaltern’ asks how cultures arise outside the boundaries of “official” high culture and how they can be made visible. To a certain extent, he draws an arc from James Baldwin to John Giorno.
Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. Allen Lane. 2019
Afropäisch. Eine Reise durch das Schwarze Europa. Aus dem Englischen von Helmut Dierlamm. Suhrkamp 2020
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