David Adetayo Olusoga was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1970 to a Nigerian father and British mother. At five years old he moved to the UK with his mother, growing up in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, on a council estate where his family was among very few non-white households. His childhood was marked by racial harassment, including repeated attacks on the family home by the National Front, which eventually forced them to move.
Olusoga studied History at the University of Liverpool, focusing on the history of slavery, before completing postgraduate broadcast journalism training at Leeds Trinity University. He built a television career first behind the camera in production before moving in front of it as a presenter of historical documentaries.
His 2016 book Black and British: A Forgotten History, and the accompanying BBC series, became a landmark work in bringing centuries of overlooked Black British history — from Roman Britain to the Windrush generation — into mainstream public understanding. The book won the Longman-History Today Trustees Award and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.
Olusoga has since presented numerous acclaimed BBC series including A House Through Time, Civilisations, and the BAFTA-winning Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester, and in 2021 received the British Academy's President's Medal for his contribution to public understanding of history.
- Author of Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016), winner of the Longman-History Today Trustees Award and PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize
- BAFTA-winning presenter and filmmaker for Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners
- Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester since 2019
- Recipient of the British Academy's President's Medal (2021) for contribution to public understanding of the humanities
- Presenter of major BBC historical series including A House Through Time, Civilisations, and Empire
- Personal history can fuel professional purpose. Olusoga's childhood experience of racism in Gateshead directly informed his lifelong scholarly focus on uncovering marginalised history.
- Make rigorous scholarship accessible. His success lies in translating serious historical research into documentaries and books that reach a mass public audience.
- Reframe the narrative, don't just add to it. Black and British didn't simply add Black figures to existing British history — it argued their stories were always central to it.
- Institutional and public roles can reinforce each other. Olusoga combines a university professorship with mainstream broadcasting, each lending credibility and reach to the other.