Nels Abbey
Nels Abbey is a British-Nigerian writer, media executive and satirist. Prior to moving into media, he was a banker.
His personal experiences in the banking and media corporate worlds inspired him to write the 2019 satirical self-help book, Think Like A White Man. His new book, The Hip-Hop MBA: Lessons in Cut-Throat Capitalism From The Moguls of Rap, will be published in 2024.
Nels is a regular columnist for the Guardian and is published widely across the spectrum of quality international publications, including the Financial Times, The Metro, The Independent, Foreign Policy magazine, The I, The Voice and others. He is a frequent contributor to all major British news and current affairs shows and has appeared on Britain’s flagship political show BBC Question Time.
His essays have appeared in several anthology collections including BFI Blackstar (2016), Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (2019), OF THIS OUR COUNTRY: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity & Culture they know (2021)and BLACK BRITISH LIVES MATTER (2021).
In 2022 Nels, a former boarder, wrote and presented a Radio 4 documentary called Boarding Schools: The System That Rules Britain, which focuses on the colonial legacy of boarding schools, an educational model built around and exported by empire-minded Britons of the 19th century. He also wrote a 2022 mini-documentary for the Runnymede Trust and Greenpeace on race and the climate crisis.
In 2020 Nels co-founded the Black Writers Guild. In 2023 he founded Uppity: An Intellectual Playground for the Refined and the Boujee, a new one-of-a-kind live event series exploring arts, culture and politics in a unique manner.