Gracie Mae Bradley

Gracie is the host of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Locating Legacies podcast, co-author of Against Borders (Verso, 2022), and author of the essay From Grenfell to Windrush which appears in “After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response” (Pluto Press, 2019). Her political writing has appeared in The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, The Independent, Vice, and elsewhere. Her first short story, Peacetime, was published in Salvage Magazine #13 (2022), and her poem Unlawful Gathering appears in When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic (Policy Press, 2023). Gracie is part of the Saturday School creative learning lab curated by Migrants in Culture, and in 2021 co-facilitated the Black Abolitionist Futures reading group.

Gracie has over a decade’s experience in developing and landing creative strategies for systemic change in solidarity with people at the sharpest end of unfair power structures. In January 2024 she coordinated Grenfell Testimony Week, supporting fifty bereaved and survivors to speak their truths to the companies and public authorities many of them hold responsible for the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. In 2023 she was the first woman to direct Friends of the Earth Scotland, scoping and drafting a transformative three-year strategy to keep Scotland’s carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. During her tenure at the pressure group Liberty, including a stint of over a year as Director, she strategised and won a string of bold, ambitious campaigns to defend civil liberties across protest, migration, policing, surveillance, and the pandemic.

Gracie was born and grew up in social housing in Leicester, surrounded by a big and loving family. She holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy & French from Trinity College, University of Oxford, and an MSc in Human Rights from the LSE. From autumn 2024 she is a James McCune Smith Scholar at the University of Glasgow studying for a Doctorate in Fine Art in Creative Writing.