Zeitgeisters

Profiles of the people whose ideas are helping to shape the future

ZAKIA SEWELL

Broadcaster, Writer, DJ

Zakia Sewell is a writer and broadcaster and the presenter of the ever excellent ‘Dream Time’ show on Radio 6 Music on Sunday evenings.

In March, she published her first book, Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain, which has landed among those of us who have spent long decades toiling in the fusty backrooms of British folk culture with a welcome splash of energy and hope.

Sewell’s own ancestry – rural Welsh on her father’s side and from the Caribbean island of Carriacou on her mother’s – gives her a fresh perspective on the tales, songs, and customs that make up “the matter of Britain” and how these strange, stubborn cultural artefacts might help us to reset our sense of national identity.

The Big Idea

Seduced by the plangent jazz folk of Pentangle and intrigued to find out more about a pagan past that isn’t taught in school, Sewell set off in search of the “alternative spirit of the nation”. Her ‘Albion’ is the mythic, mystical twin of ‘Great Britain’, the familiar country of royalty, stately homes, extractive capitalism, and empire. In contrast, Albion is “both subversive and strange, shrouded in magic and mystery, and which leaves traces in the land, and all through our culture, if only we know where to look”.

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