Amrit Wilson | |
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Born | 1941 (age 82–83) India |
Occupation(s) | Writer, journalist and activist |
Notable work | Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (1978) |
Amrit Wilson (born 1941),[1] Indian by birth and based in Britain,[2] is a writer, journalist and activist who since the 1970s has focused on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics.[3] Her 1978 book Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain[4] won the Martin Luther King Award, and remains an influential feminist book.[2] Her other book publications include Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2006), and as a journalist she has been published in outlets including Ceasefire Magazine,[5] Media Diversified,[6] openDemocracy[7] and The Guardian.[8][9]
Wilson grew up in India and came to Britain as a student in 1961. She became a freelance journalist in 1974, and was active as an anti-racist militant in the 1970s.[10] Wilson's book Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain, first published in 1978 and reprinted 40 years later,[11] has been described as "[c]hallenging the views of South Asian women as weak, submissive, one-dimensional stereotypes" and as having "cleared the space for Asian women to speak for themselves".[12] Wilson was a founder member of Awaz, the UK's first Asian feminist collective, and was active in OWAAD, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (1978–82).[3][13] She was formerly chair of Imkaan, a national network of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee women's refuges and services for women facing violence, and is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group.[7][14]
She also was Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies/South Asian Studies at Luton University,[15] and has carried an Overseas Citizenship of India.[16]