top of page
About

Lindsay is a writer and broadcaster. 

He has written for the Evening Standard, The Times, the TLS,  the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph, together with The Voice, Prospect, The Spectator, The Oldie, Antigone Journal, and Standpoint magazines in the U.K. He has also written for The Root and Africa's A Country in the USA and for the Cape Argus in South Africa.

He currently makes "erudite but accessible" radio and TV arts documentaries for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio  4 and BBC 4. Past programs include on Capetonian novelist Alex La Guma (aka the Black Dickens)Chicagoan, Jazz Age painter Archibald Motley, Jr.the African influence on five global citiesMartinican revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon,  The Canon Wars , Children of the Caribbean Revolution, journeys in South African cuisineHarlem Renaissance novelist and polymath Rudolph Fisher and the movement to promote the Kaaps language in Cape Town, South Africa.


From Dante​ to Denzel, from the Classics and Horace to Shakespeare to Smokey Robinson, novelist and freedom fighter Alex La GumaFrantz Fanon, black Classicist Frank Snowden, Jr,  Guyanese revolutionary intellectual Dr. Walter Rodney, Coloured South African poet Arthur Nortje, Cape Townian jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, Harlem Renaissance novelist and polymath Rudolph Fisher, Martinican poet and playwright Aimé CésaireAthol Fugard, English poet James Elroy Flecker, English crime fiction novelist Edmund Crispin and classicist Gilbert Highet via Rue Cases-Nègres and Trading Places, from Boccaccio to Baldwin, from Rattigan to Rambo via Ta-Nehisi Coates, Colson WhiteheadRescuing Socrates and even Michael Frayn's Noises Off, he relishes his ability to oscillate effortlessly between the classical canon and the contemporary cutting edge.

 

He is currently a (non-residential) Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

He has recently been heralded as Britain's most prolific blood donor, after having given 25 platelet donations in 2022.

He has also endowed The Clément Olympe Lavanne Prize for work in Francophone literature, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at The University of Oxford, which will be awarded in honour of the Martinican soldier, polymath, and his “second dad”, for the first time in July 2023.

He is a Fellow of the British-American Project and an advisor to Kreol Magazine.

He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Foundation and a volunteer mentor with the educational charity Classics For All.

Since 2005 he has been a mentor to young people in Peckham, South London. 

bottom of page