Désirée Reynolds

Sheffield Community Radio In 1996, while she was in her early 20s, Reynolds moved to South Yorkshire to study first English and then cultural studies at the University of Sheffield, and has lived and worked there since. After living with a family friend for several months, she moved out and became a DJ on pirate radio station Sheffield Community Radio, playing hip-hop, R&B and jungle music. After she became pregnant, Reynolds stopped DJing—which had involved carrying her records to various "stinky and skanky" high rise flats—but continued to write.

In 2018, Reynolds edited Talk About Change: Writing As Resistance, an anthology exploring diversity, feminism, immigration, and race, as part of a University of Sheffield-funded collaboration with the Festival of the Mind, local social enterprise Our Mel, and the Linguistic DNA project. Later that year, she received a Developing Your Own Practice award from Arts Council England, to support the writing of new work—including a novel about the collapse of a Haitian plantation, as well as a short story about Sarah Baartman's brief stay in Manchester in 1811.

In 2021, Reynolds was longlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize. In 2024, Tyke Films and the BFI Network produced a 12-minute adaptation of Reynolds' story "Born on Sunday, Silent", directed by Eelyn Lee. The film is based on the true story of a baby, Kai Akosua Mansah, who was born and died in Sheffield in 1902.

Curation From 2020, Reynolds was guest curator for Off the Shelf Festival of Words. She organised the festival's Black Women Write Now strand until 2022, programming events with authors such as Kit de Waal and Candice Braithwaite. After finding there was little Black history on display at Sheffield City Archives, she founded the archival justice project Dig Where You Stand (DWYS), In collaboration with the archives, the Centre for Equity and Inclusion at the University of Sheffield, and brand agency Peter & Paul, DWYS runs a biennial festival of free exhibitions and events across the city.

Reception In its review of The Book of Sheffield, Wasafiri said Reynolds' short story "Born on Sunday, Silent" was a "powerful story of the unmarked grave of an African child dating from the early 1900s, and the city’s shameful collusion in a racist and imperial past". Writing in The Guardian, Kadish Morris describes Seduce as "a hurricane of a book that pulsates with love, sex, shame, class and religion".

Publications As editor Talk About Change: Writing as Resistance (as editor), edited by Désirée Reynolds (University of Sheffield, 2018) Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories, edited by Jacob Ross (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2015) Elevator Fiction: micro narratives under 500 words by 30 BAME writers (Manchester: Crocus Books, 2016) "Born on Sunday Silent" in The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Catherine Taylor (Manchester: Comma Press, 2019) Test Signal: A Northern Anthology of New Writing, edited by Nathan Connolly (Liverpool/London: Dead Ink and Bloomsbury, 2022) Collision: Stories from the Science of CERN, edited by Ron Appleby and Connie Potter (Manchester: Comma Press, 2023)

Life writing Tangled Roots, edited by Dr. Katy Massey (Leeds, 2013).