Johny Pitts

Johny Pitts is a British writer, photographer, and broadcaster born in Sheffield in 1983 to a Jamaican-American father and British mother. He studied in Sheffield and has worked as a model, photographer, and journalist. He is the founder of Afropean.com, a travel and arts journal exploring Black European identity. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019, Allen Lane) is his first book, documenting a journey through the Black communities and subcultures of Europe — Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Moscow, Brussels — to map a Black European identity rarely acknowledged by either European or African-American culture. Combining memoir, photography, history, and cultural criticism, it won the Jhalak Prize in 2020 and the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award. Pitts's work is distinguished by its ability to hold together personal experience, cultural history, and political analysis in a readable and visually rich form.