Page 50 - Powerlist 2019 - Digital Edition

NEW Mo Abudu
Media, Publishing & Entertainment Crowned ‘Africa’s first lady of chat’, media mogul Mo

2019
CEO/Executive Chair, Ebonylife TV

Abudu entered the world of TV as founder of the Nigeria-
based EbonyLife TV, which prides itself as being Africa’s
first global black entertainment and lifestyle network. It
currently draws in more than 8million regular viewers in
more than 49 countries. One of the guiding principles of
Ebonylife TV is the need to tell the world a different and
more positive story about Africa than it is used to seeing.
Perhaps most famously, London-born Mo is the creator,
executive producer and host of EbonyLife TV’s talk show
Moments With Mo. The show was the first of its kind to be
syndicated across Africa, and has been running for more
than 10 years, with a guest list boasting the likes of Hillary
Clinton, former President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari,
Nobel Prize winner Professor Wole Soyinka and Managing
Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine
Lagarde.
In 2014, Mo set up Ebonylife Films, and was the executive
producer of its first feature length film FIFTY, which was
the biggest premiere in the history of the Nigerian movie
industry and the top-grossing Nigerian film of 2015. It was
NEW Gary Younge selected to screen at the 2015 London Film Festival.
2019 Her second feature film, The Wedding Party, premiered
Journalist; Author at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and has
since become the highest grossing movie in the history of
Author, broadcaster and editor-at-large for The Guardian, Nollywood. Prior to her media career, Mo made her name
Gary also writes a monthly column, Beneath the Radar, for as an executive in ExxonMobil for nearly a decade, as the
The Nation magazine and is the Alfred Knobler Fellow for promoter behind the Protea Hotel Oakwood Park, and as
The Nation Institute. the founder of Vic Lawrence & Associates, one of Nigeria’s
He has written five critically acclaimed books, including leading outsourcing firms.
the multi award-winning Another Day in the Death of
America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech: The
Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; and No Place Like
Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South.
He has made numerous radio and TV documentaries on
subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.
Born in Hertfordshire to Barbadian parents, Gary grew
up in Stevenage until he was 17, when he went to the Sudan
with Project Trust to teach English in a United Nations
Eritrean refugee school. On his return he studied for a
French and Russian degree and was awarded a bursary
from The Guardian to study journalism at City University.
He started working at The Guardian in 1993. In 1996 he was
awarded the Laurence Stern Fellowship, which sends a
young British journalist to work at The Washington Post for
three months.
Gary was appointed The Guardian’s US correspondent in
2003, and in 2015 he returned to London where is now editor-
at-large.
This year he won (Broadsheet) Feature Writer of the
year at the Society of Editors Press Awards for a year-long
series on knife crime. He also won Feature of the Year at the
Amnesty Media Awards for an article in the same series.
Other gongs include Comment Piece of the Year from The
Comment Awards for an article about Barack Obama’s
legacy, the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from
Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and, for three years from
2001 to 2003 Best Newspaper Journalist in Britain’s Ethnic
Minority Media Awards. He is currently a visiting professor
at London South Bank University.

46 Powerlist 2019