Emily Zobel Marshall

Emily Zobel Marshall is of French-Caribbean and British heritage and grew up in the mountains of Eryri in North Wales. She is a Professor in Postcolonial Literature at Leeds Beckett University. She is an expert on the trickster figure in the folklore, oral cultures and literature of the African Diaspora and has published widely in these fields, including her books Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance (2012, University of the West Indies Press) and American Trickster: Trauma Tradition and Brer Rabbit (2019, Rowman and Littlefield).

She plays mas in Leeds West Indian carnival and has established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform and network that aims to bring the critical, creative, academic and artistic aspects of carnival into dialogue with one another.  She consults several arts, historical and educational organisations on decolonial methodologies and approaches and is Co-Chair of the David Oluwale Memorial Association, a charity committed to fighting racism and homelessness. She regularly contributes to discussions on race and racial politics in the media and has interviewed many world-famous writers, artists and musicians, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, LKJ, Gary Younge, Caryl Phillips, Yinka Shonibare and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Emily has had poems published in the Peepal Tree Press anthologies Weighted Words and Sanctury (2021, 2024), Magma (‘The Loss’, Issue 75, 2019), Smoke Magazine (Issue 67, 2020), The Caribbean Writer (Vol 34, 2020, Vol 35, 2021 & Vol 36, 2021) and Stand (Vol. 19, No. 4). Her poetry collection, Bath of Herbs, published by Peepal Tree Press in July 2023, is described as ‘spellbinding’ and ‘a beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an ‘othered’, unmappable, positionality.’

Author photograph by Ashley Karrell.