Amanda Holiday was born in 1964 in
Sierra Leone. She completed the foundation art course at
Jacob Kramer College alongside
Clio Barnard and
Damien Hirst and went on to study
fine art at
Wimbledon School of Art graduating in 1987. Holiday was active in the second wave of the
Black British art movement, undertaking large-scale figurative mixed-media drawings.
The Hum of History, in charcoal and chalk, was "a cyclic story about hope in the 80s". Her work was exhibited in major 1980s black British art exhibitions including
Creation for Liberation,
Some of us are Brave,
Black Art: Plotting the Course and
Black Perspectives. It tells the story of a mixed-race teenager, Bira, from the North of England married off to a white boatman. Embarking on her honeymoon, Bira escapes the racism of her everyday life by constructing a fantasy world in which she is a princess.
Manao Tupapau looked at the experience of
Merahi metua no Tehamana modelling for
Paul Gauguin in
Tahiti. From 2001 to 2010 Holiday lived in
Cape Town, writing and directing several educational television series. In 2019, Holiday completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) MA course at the
University of East Anglia. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the
Brunel International African Poetry Prize and in the same year founded
Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, the UK's first crowdfunded poetry press. As of 2021, she is Techne funded PhD candidate at the School of Humanities and Social Science at
Brighton University. ==Work==