Gary Andrew YoungeFAcSS, FRSL (born January 1969)[1][2] is a British journalist, author, broadcaster and academic. He was editor-at-large for The Guardian newspaper, which he joined in 1993. In November 2019, it was announced that Younge had been appointed as professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and would be leaving his post at The Guardian, where he was a columnist for two decades, although he continued to write for the newspaper.[3] He also writes for the New Statesman.
Younge is the author of the books No Place Like Home (2002), Stranger in a Strange Land (2006), and Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (2011), The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream (2013), and Another Day in the Death of America (2016).
In 1984, aged 15, he briefly joined the Young Socialists, the youth section of the Workers Revolutionary Party, but left a year later after harassment from other party members, including allegedly being accused of working for MI5 and claims that he supported Fidel Castro only because of his ethnicity.[6] At the age of 17, Younge went to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school in Sudan with the educational charity Project Trust.[7]
From 1987 to 1992, he attended Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he studied French and Russian,[8][9] and was elected vice president (welfare) of the student association, a paid sabbatical post that he held for a year.[9]
Career
In his final year at university, Younge was awarded a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at The City University in London, and after a short internship at Yorkshire Television he joined The Guardian in 1993, and has since reported from all over Europe, and Africa, the US and the Caribbean.[7]
His book, No Place Like Home, in which he retraced the route of the civil rightsFreedom Riders, was published in 1999 and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His subsequent books are Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (2006), Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (2011), The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream (2013), and most recently Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016), a "deeply affecting" account of everyday fatalities among young people across the US,[10] which in 2017 won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.[7] Younge also wrote a monthly column for The Nation, "Beneath the Radar".[11]
In 2019, Younge was appointed a professor of sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Manchester University, writing his last column for The Guardian in January 2020.[3][12]
Younge was named on the 2020 list of 100 Great Black Britons.[13] In addition, on the 2020 and 2021Powerlist, Younge was listed among the Top 100 of the most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent.[14]
His 2023 book, Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter, a collection of his journalism covering four decades of reporting from Britain, the US, and South Africa, was described in the New Statesman as "a reminder of how much racism has changed and how much it has stayed the same."[15]
Personal life
In 2011, Younge relocated to Chicago, where he lived with his immediate family until returning to the UK in 2015.[7] In 2015, he announced his intention to move to Hackney in London,[16] with his wife and two children.[7] His brother Pat Younge was chief creative officer of BBC Vision,[17] becoming chair of the council at Cardiff University in 2022.[18]
No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. 2002. ISBN9781578064885. OCLC49226176.
^”De Gaulle acquiesced [in producing a white infantry division]... So it was that on August 25 many of those who fought for Europe’s liberation were denied the right to participate in it... the freedom for which they were fighting did not apply to them. They call it the blanchiment” (Younge does not mention that the ashes of Félix Éboué were interred in the Pantheon 1949)
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