World icons with a Cambridge connection

Zadie Smith

Born to Jamaican and English parents. Studied English at King’s. Author of the seminal book ‘White Teeth’. Her subsequent works have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize as well winning the Orange Prize for Fiction. One of Britain’s leading young writers.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Ghanian philosopher who studied in Cambridge. Born in 1954 to the famous Ghanian politician, John Appiah, and a famous English mother, Peggy Cripps . Appiah is one of the world’s leading intellectuals with interests in political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Openly gay activist and has also worked with the famous Henry Louis Gates (the most important leading African-American intellectual) at Harvard. In 1992, Appiah published In My Father’s House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English. He is currently the Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton.

Amartya Sen

Indian economist and philosopher. He received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on welfare economics. He was the first ever Asian to head an Oxbridge college (Trinity 1998-2004). One of the world’s leading thinkers whose work on gender inequality and development has had profound effect on the UN and other institutions in tackling poverty and development. His works have been translated in over 30 languages. He is honorary president of Oxfam and is currently Lamont Professor at Harvard.

Nelson Mandela

Cambridge link is that he was made an Honorary Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 2001. To this day there are Mandela scholarships awarded to South Africans coming to study in Cambridge.

Salman Rushdie

Studied at King’s. Winner of the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children.

Diane Abbot MP

Studied at Newnham

Rt. Rev. John Sentamu, Archbishop of York

Read theology at Selwyn College and later was chaplain there

Allama Iqbal

The spiritual founder of Pakistan who studied at Trinity and died in 1936

Jahawarlal Nehru

India’s first Prime Minister at Independence in 1947

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778 -1860)

Black Polish-born virtuoso violinist, who lived in England for much of his life. Studied music at Cambridge University. He worked with Beethoven who presented him with his tuning fork(!). Beethoven dedicated his great Violin Sonata No.9 to Bridgewater. He was to go and compose himself and was elected to the presitigious Royal Society of Musicians in 1807. More … >

Haile Selassie’s grandson, Zera Yacob Amha Selassie (Born 1953)

Came to Cambridge to study. He now lives in Ethiopia and is recognised as Head of the Imperial House of Ethiopia.