Survivors

Dr. Hannah Durkin is a historian specialising in transatlantic slavery and African diasporic art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Leeds Trinity University. She has taught at Nottingham and Newcastle universities, and recently served as a Guest Researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which is working to memorialise the Clotilda survivors, and was the keynote speaker at Africatown's 2021 Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival founded by the Clotilda Descendants Association. She is the recipient of more than a dozen academic prizes, including a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.

'Gripping . . . a remarkably wide-ranging book taking in everything from science to soft drinks to show how slavery's insidious hand wormed its way into the very fabric of American life'

The Times

'Hannah Durkin lets the enslaved speak for themselves, and they tell a story not only of unimaginable suffering but also of courage and survival'

Wall Street Journal

'Devastating and visceral... Durkin's exhaustive, exhilarating research has created something new - something personal, emotional, almost tangible - from the history of this collective trauma'

Literary Review

'A very powerful piece of historical writing because it is both thorough and reflective but also because it also provides us with a mirror to our own times'

Aspects of History

'Absorbing and affecting ... Sheds new light on the experiences of female survivors of the slave trade... The author captures the complexities of the survivors' experiences'

Christian Science Monitor

'Durkin has delivered a landmark book mapping out not just a handful of such stories, but an entire tragic diaspora'

AL.com

'Survivors, a comprehensive account of one of the most important parts of American history, is a triumph'

Booklist (starred review)

'A sweeping history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land in America . . . Durkin's in-depth view is based largely on the survivors' own words and perspectives (some lived into the 20th century and related their stories to various writers, most notably Zora Neale Hurston), and is woven together with her extensive archival research. It's a stirring saga of resilience that sheds new light on Black life in postbellum America'

Publishers Weekly (starred review)