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Yomi Adegoke is a multi-award winning journalist, presenter and social commentator best known for her book, Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible (2019). She has spoken at numerous literary festivals and appeared on various prestigious panels at events for The British Library, Guardian Fresh Voices and Intelligence Squared, among others.
Picked as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2021, Yomi covers prominent subjects such as race and feminism. Her professional and personal experiences of these topics make her a popular choice as a keynote speaker.
Contact Great British Speakers today to book Diversity and Inclusion Speaker Yomi Adegoke for your next event.
Yomi Adegoke was named one of the most influential people in London by the Evening Standard, as well as winning the Groucho Maverick Award and the Marie Clare Future Shaper award.
Her journalism career started young; she took a year out of University and founded Birthday Magazine in 2013, a publication aimed at teenage black girls, discussing race, feminism and pop culture. Thanks to her journalism experience, the creative website The-Dots described her as a woman who was “redefining the creative industry”.
Yomi Adegoke has published a number of successful books, her most popular being Slay in Your Line: The Black Girl Bible. Nine publishers fought for the rights to the book before being published by 4th Estate in 2018. To write the book, Yomi and her co-writer Elizabeth Uviebinené interviewed a range of accomplished black women including Malorie Blackman, Denise Lewis, Jamelia, Clara Amfo, Laura Mvula, Karen Blackett and June Sarpong, in order to cover topics such as work, education, money, health, dating and media representation of race. This was followed up in 2021 with Slay In Your Lane: The Journal, which offered activities, exercises and tips to help black British women to know their worth and to find success in every area of their lives.
Yomi Adegoke also helped edit Loud Black Girls: 20 Black Women Writers Ask: What’s Next? (2022), an anthology of black British writing including journalists, authors, activists, actors and artists to explore what it means to exist in turbulent times. She also edited the essay, #RepresentationMatters: The Oppressor in the Mirror: An Essay from the collection ‘Of This Our Country’ (2021). Through 25 essays, she examined the uncomfortable truths about class, privilege and society in Nigeria.
In recent years, Yomi Adegoke has become one of the country’s leading voices on race, feminism and pop culture and how they intersect, as well as class and politics. She is also known for critiquing dating and relationships, reality TV, art, music and culture.
Yomi Adegoke presented Where are the black women in grime? (2019) a BBC Radio 4 documentary, created the Channel 4 comedy documentary Black Love (2020) presented by comedian Mo Gillgan and co-hosted a BBC Radio 6 takeover for Black History Month. She has been a regular guest on Sky, ITV news and BBC Radio. She writes a weekly column on reality TV for The Guardian and has written for British Vogue, the i newspaper, The Washington Post, Vice and Elle, and has been nominated for British Journalism Awards and Comment awards.
Yomi Adegoke is a trustee for the charity Arts Emergency, which helps make the creative industries more accessible to marginalised young people, and an ambassador for Eve Appeal, the leading UK national charity funding research into gynaecological cancers.
A highly influential and motivational keynote speaker, she has spoken at events such as the Online Book Fair Seminar where she discussed diversity in publishing and how the industry can become more inclusive and accessible.
Stay In Your Lane is a brilliant book about what it is like to be a woman, black and a Londoner in 2018. Everyone should read it.
Sadiq Khan