Writer Diran Adebayo “does for black urban Britain what Irvine Welsh did for working-class Edinburgh: his novels resonate with the slang and street idioms of the multicultural inner city. ‘I want to reach a stage where black characters can talk in a language as universal as white characters. You know, the film Titanic plays from Lagos to Delhi to London and no one has a problem taking lessons of love from it. But what would happen if you did the same thing with an all-black cast? It would be a ‘black film’, just as my books are still categorised sometimes as ‘black books’. People have a much harder time drawing an objective message from that.”