I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes.

I do not mind at all. I'm Jackie Kaye and the National Poet of Scotland. In this

world service documentary I'm going to tell you about the African American writer Zora Neil Hurston.

Zora Neil Hurston has been described as a woman half in shadow.

For a long time very little was remembered about her. She disappeared

from view. But I want you to know about her, to bring her into the sunlight.

She was a to bring her into the sunlight.

She was a dazzling African-American writer from the deep south who rose to fame in the 1930s,

but had been all but forgotten when she died in 1960. In recent years

Zura Star has risen again. Writers from Alice Walker to Zady Smith and Tony Morrison have claimed her as their own and what a

literary foremother she is to claim a novelist and folklorist an anthropologist and short story writer an essay and never mind black women were all but invisible though nobody seemed to have told

Zura. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature

somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal.

No, I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

When Zora wrote her most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937,

she was at the height of her powers, a book that effortlessly weaves a lyric voice with a black vernacular, it is still fresh today.

I first read it in 1981 in the summer holidays in London.

Brixton was ablaze with the riots. I'd never come across characters like the

ones on Zora's porch. Suburban Bishop Briggs near Glasgow when I was brought up was so completely

different to the world that sprang into life in Zora's fiction.

And yet I felt a thrilling sense of recognition reading her.

Her characters, though I'd never met them before in fiction or in life, were people that felt familiar to me.

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