About Us

Welcome to Afrori Books

Afrori was born from frustration. Our founder, Carolynn Bain, was tired of going to bookstores and having to search for ages to find the tiny 'BAME' section that had been allocated to black authors. Surely, they deserved more than that? It is hard to become an author, it is even harder to be a black author.

As a book lover it would take Carolynn days, sometimes even weeks, to find a book by a black author. It was hard to find all the genres I liked and impossible to get personal recommendations for of any of these books.

So here at Afrori Books we started to ask some big questions.
 What if we could get the biggest book wholesaler in the country to partner with us?What if we could build a site and provide a platform to sell black authors books at reasonable prices?
What if we could put together a crack team to spend months searching for books by black authors in every genre possible?

And we did exactly that.

We have created a bookstore with the largest wholesaler in the country offering our customers one of the biggest selection of books by black authors in one place. We are the home for black authors. Your one stop shop for great books by black authors.

We opened our bricks and mortar shop in October 2021 and in May 2023 moved to our current space in The Brighthelm Centre.

Here we have an incredible selection of the books that are available online. The bookshop is a great place to browse have a reasonably priced tea, coffee and sometimes cake and just chill in a safe space.
But, we are so much more than a bookshop. We are a social enterprise meeting the needs of the community. We also deliver anti-racism training to adults, run anti-racist clubs in schools across Sussex, Hair workshops, author events, a women's singing group,women of colour yoga sessions, writers workshops, music events, a book festival and so much more.