‘For as long as I can remember my hair’s unusual texture had met with curiosity and often with outright derision. “Here, let’s have a feel of it” and “How on earth do you comb that?” or “What kind of shampoo do you use? Is it the stuff they use to clean carpets, or what?” Tina Shingler

Tina Shingler is the author of Hair Apparent, an inspirational ‘hairmoire’ embracing the powerful legacy of afro hair across seventy years of changing trends in fashion and culture. It is based on Tina’s experience of growing up as a Black Barnardo’s child in the fifties and sixties in the white space of rural North Yorkshire, and it tracks her history in the UK, Italy, the US and India.

Tina has a life-long interest in identity. She wrote one of, if not the, first children’s books to address afro hair, Princess Katrina and the Hair Charmer (Tamarind Books) as early as 2004; today that book is used as a diversity teaching aid in schools across the country.

Tina is already well established in the North of England through her work on diversity issues with schools, libraries and charities. As an empathetic and expert spokesperson on the complexities of Black hair and its cultural connotations today, her inspirational message about recognising your own self-worth against the odds will strike a chord with readers Black and white, young and old, everywhere.