Annika Allen
Co-founder Black Magic Awards
Annika Allen / Photography by MarkXPhotos
Annika Allen’s career spans an impressive number of industries, including journalism, publishing, events, content and TV production. She started out as a music, entertainment and culture journalist, writing for several magazines and newspapers, including the Birmingham Post, Black Hair, The Voice newspaper and Pride Magazine. Along the way she amassed an envy-inducing list of interview subjects including Janet Jackson and Idris Elba. After a stint in TV, working on entertainment and reality formats, Annika was keen to return to journalism, but said she found it hard to get her foot in the door of a full-time role. The obvious answer was to set up her own magazine, and Flavourmag was born.
Established as a youth lifestyle title, it was distributed to universities and colleges across the UK and also published online. In the absence of the big budgets of its competitors, Annika says they had to find creative ways of spreading the word and connecting with their audience – which meant starting a series of events, featuring artists the magazine had interviewed. Eventually, the mag caught the eye of brands that were also keen to connect with a younger, diverse audience, and Annika found herself overseeing an entirely new revenue stream, helping companies build websites, create content and do social media.
Fast forward to today and Annika is still drawing on her journalistic experience to create content for Barclays’ diversity and inclusion team. If that isn’t enough, she teamed up with Britain’s Got Talent Golden Buzzer winner Kojo Anim to set up the Black Magic Awards - an annual awards ceremony that celebrates and recognises inspirational Black British talent. “If you talk to younger people about their role models, they often look to the US and their heroes might be Barack and Michelle Obama, rappers or influencers,” she says. “In the UK it’s probably a footballer or music artist. But outside of that, a lot of people couldn’t tell you who the exceptional Black people are in the UK, who are doing fantastic things and paving the way for them to have careers in whatever industry they’re interested in.”
It’s something Annika has experienced herself. Although she wanted to be a journalist, she says growing up, there wasn’t anyone around her in media or creative roles, so she had to learn to navigate the industry herself. “I had to find my own footing and understand how things work, and that I needed to network with people and build relationships,” she explains. “Those aren’t things you’re naturally taught, especially when you go to a local state comprehensive school. Representation matters. Think about how you may have approached life differently if you regularly saw people that looked like you in positions of power.”
It’s one of the things she hopes she can address with the Black Magic Awards, by highlighting Black talent that’s often neglected or ignored by mainstream awards shows. Now in its fourth year, hundreds of people of all backgrounds have walked its black carpet, and Annika says guests leave uplifted, entertained and inspired by what they’ve heard: “We wanted to create a platform that made a difference, where we can see positive images of ourselves, be unapologetically Black, and be in a room and space to tell our stories and speak our truth.”
Interview by Emma Tucker
