Paul Boakye

Paul Boakye is a creative writer and marketing expert who sat on the Power Commission - an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy. He specializes in targeting niche audiences through the arts, business, and educational printed resources. He was editor & CEO of the consumer lifestyle magazine, "Drum", and is the author of five plays published for an academic audience in the United States by Alexander Street Press.

Boakye’s debut play "Jacob’s Ladder" took the UK Student Playscript Award in 1986 while he was still at Birmingham University. In 1991, "Hair", portraying the cultural gap between a Jamaican single mother and her British-born son, received the BBC Radio Drama Young Playwrights’ Award. In his self-produced "Boy with Beer" (1992), “Boakye chooses to deal with hitherto taboo subjects including the making of a black gay couple, bisexuality, and AIDS,” wrote The Voice (newspaper).

Biography

Playwright, essayist, editor, and seasoned business award winning, Paul has written for theatre, radio, film, TV, academia and magazines, states the WritersNet database. Listed in The Routledge "Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture" edited by Alison Donnell (2002); Paul Boakye’s plays include dramas about concepts of beauty ("Hair") homosexual love ("Boy with Beer"), drug addiction and AIDS ("No Mean Street"), masculinity ("Safe") and mental health issues ("Wicked Games").

“Paul rises above the temptation to self-censor with an uncompromising representation of subject and character,” wrote Yvonne Brewster, O.B.E. in her introduction to "Black Plays: Three" published by Methuen Drama in which she included the play "Boy with Beer" alongside the work of four other contemporary black British playwrights.

“His provocative and existential writing comes of age in "Wicked Games", a dramatisation of contemporary postcolonial British identity as experienced by a group of London friends enacting the ‘social structures in which we live’ on a holiday in Ghana. This conflict between “the British, American, and African Dreams” is also explored in "Darker than Blue: Black British Experience of Home and Abroad" published in "Britishness and Cultural Studies – Continuity and Change in Narrating the Nation" edited by Krzysztof Knauer and Simon Murray (2000).” – Quoted from The Routledge "Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture" edited by Alison Donnell (2002), pp 52.

elected bibliography

* Boakye, P. (2004) "Wicked Games", "Safe", "No Mean Street", "Boy with Beer", and "Hair", in "Black Drama": Alexander Street Press, USA.
* (2001& 2002) Editor "In the Family" [ISBN 0-9529964-3-X] , and "In the Family 2" [ISBN 0-9529964-5-6] , London: GMFA.
* (2000) "Darker than Blue", in K. Knauer and S. Murray (eds) "Britishness and Cultural Studies: Continuity and Change in Narrating the Nation", Katowice, Poland: Slask, pp. 188-212.
* (1997) "No Mean Street", in "The Best Stage Scenes of 1996", New York: Smith and Kraus.
* (1997) "Wicked Games", in "The Best Stage Scenes of 1996", New York: Smith and Kraus.
* (1995) "Boy with Beer", in "Black Plays 3", London: Methuen Drama.
* (1995) Extracts from "Boy with Beer", in "The Contemporary Monologue: Men", London: Methuen Drama.

References

* The Power Commissioners: http://www.makeitanissue.org.uk/2007/01/power_commissioners.php
* 50 Leading British Ghanaians: http://www.ethnicnow.com/channels/government-politics/press-release/14/1042/50-leading-british-ghanaians.html
* Boakye on Reconnect Africa: http://www.reconnectafrica.com/Africandiaspora-AfricanDiasporaandDevelopment.jsp
* In the Family by Paul Boakye: http://www.gmfa.org.uk/londonservices/booklets/pdfs/in-the-family.pdf

Further reading

* Knauer, K. (2001) "Wicked Games: Boakye, Britishness and the Structures we Live", in "Reciprocity and Multicultural Imagination", Katowice, Poland: University of Silesia Press, pp. 95-130.