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Our monthly gatherings, and the heart of everything. We fish, cook, eat and talk together, in a space centred on Black and Global Majority people.
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Black Fish the Book
Black Fish
How to fish, and stories of the wata, kin & community
A book about fishing. And about what the wata holds.
Join We Are Black Fish Community
Hear the opening of Black Fish
Wata – the way it feels escaping the mouth – is more like a prayer.
Speech Debelle
Speech Debelle is a South London author, voice artist and angler. She wrote Black Fish, co-founded the community We Are Black Fish, and is the husky, lyrical brand voice for eBay. She won the 2009 Mercury Prize.
About Speech →The book
The book
Black Fish is part practical guide, part memoir, part conversation with seasoned anglers. It follows how our peoples have moved across water, fished it, survived it and been pushed away from it, and asks what it means to return.
We Are Black Fish Community
From the cities to the seas.
Hook Up
We Are Black Fish Community
A UK fishing community bringing people together at the British coast to fish, cook, eat and talk, and growing into a BIPOC voice for the British coast.
Coastal knowledge
Sustainable fishing, fish stocks, seasons, tides, pollution and the changing coast, explained clearly and honestly. What do we know? What's changing? What does it mean for people who fish, eat seafood and love the sea?
Food & culture
What's in season, what to do with unfamiliar British species, where saltfish comes from and whether we could salt our own. Sustainable seafood through Caribbean, African and other food cultures.
Every day at the coast becomes a story: a recipe, a film, a conversation, a lesson. Warm, curious, and always ours.
Hook Ups
Coastal knowledge
Food & culture
We Are Black Fish
Fishing leads us into the sea. The sea leads us into knowledge. The fish leads us into food and culture. And storytelling connects all of it.
Voice
The voice that helped change the way Britain sounds.
Brand voice for eBay. Google Pixel, Facebook, Barclays, ASOS, Channel 4 and more.
Music
Mercury Prize winner, 2009.
Inside the book
Inside the book
The Wata
Water not as scenery but as a living presence, something to build a relationship with, listen to and learn from.
Ancestry
Fishing as an ancestral skill, carried by peoples across water and waiting to be reclaimed.
Healing
Trusting the process, breaking cycles, and learning to be present on the shoreline.
The Craft
Everything you need to start: equipment, knots, casting, tides, weather and safety.
Community
Stories from anglers, and how to build your own fishing community.
The Wata
The Craft
The Healing
Black Fish the Book
What if the wata is listening?
Black Fish: How to fish, and stories of the wata, kin & community
Black Fish is a book about fishing. It's also about what the wata holds.
Speech Debelle didn't pick up a rod until she was 33. What she found on the UK shoreline wasn't a hobby but a relationship: with the tide, with her own body, and with the wata itself, a presence she began to suspect might be aware of her too.
Part practical guide, part memoir, part conversation with seasoned anglers, Black Fish follows how our peoples have moved across water, fished it, survived it, and been pushed away from it. It asks what it means to return. To say all rivers, lakes and seas belong to me. To heal at the wata's edge, and to build community there.
And it will teach you to fish: kit, knots, casting, tides, weather, safety, and what to do when you finally get a bite.
For anyone who has stood at the edge of the sea and felt something look back.
Why wata
Why wata
I should say, there is a reason I've been (and will be) sometimes spelling water as 'wata'. I need there to be a separation between the Oxford Dictionary meaning of the word, and the spiritual and emotional value I am adding to its presence and form. To call it 'water' in the only language I can speak feels too sterile in evoking the latter – too small, and inconsequential when speaking of its importance to us. As though it's made up of only separate parts of our lives; droplets that come out of taps, fall randomly from the skies or live at our coastlines getting on with whatever it is meant to be getting on with. But 'wata' – the way it feels escaping the mouth – is more like a prayer.
Listen & read the opening
Listen & read the opening
The First Time I Fished
The first time I fished, I was 33. I like to imagine I was drawn to some kind of secret duality in the two repeating numbers, reminding me of two soldiers standing in arms facing the same direction, or two Notting Hill Carnival parade dancers connected to each other, locked into the rhythm and whine perfectly. A natural inclination to register patterns. A need to make sense of things.
Before then, or more specifically, at the age of 30, I did not know how to live in my own body. I'm still learning how. How to be in the present, without the anxiety of future social engagements and conversations that want to pull from a body still in its thawing process. Not yet knowing how to regulate my emotions, hitting seven, on the 0–10 internal meter, before I've even said a word. Leaving anyone clearly unaware by my stoic disposition of the implosion taking place. But this has been my work. If there were a karmic agreement I made before entering this life, I get the sneaking suspicion this work of being present was a key part of negotiations.
Over time I'm becoming more comfortable with how uncomfortable being open and in the present feels. No longer so anxious and on 10mg of Sertraline to temper a nervous system overly obsessed with what could happen, and without the need for continuous avoidance tools like Jameson Whiskey to numb the pain of what has happened.
Many days you can often catch me on the shoreline of the UK with two fishing rods facing the sky, for a time, concerned only with how high or low the sun is on the horizon. Or giving a nod of attention to the distance of the incoming tide and wondering whether I should move backward away from it now or give it another 30 minutes or so before re-shuffling my fishing gear. As though time is being represented by the movement of nature.
Fishing is one of the mechanisms I've discovered that not only grounds and centres me but reminds me of my ancestral connection to the wata and the healing it offers.
The Audiobook
The Audiobook
Read by the author. Hear Black Fish in Speech's own voice.
For events, talks and press, get in touch.
Voice
The voice that helped change the way Britain sounds.
For decades, British advertising spoke in one voice: polished, distant, received pronunciation. Then brands started asking for something different. Conversational. Rhythmic. Real. A voice that sounded like a friend telling you a story, not an announcer selling you something.
Speech Debelle was at the front of that shift. A Mercury Prize-winning lyricist, she was one of the first to carry the cadence of UK rap and spoken word into mainstream advertising, and she proved that a South London voice, just as it is, could carry the weight of global tech brands and major banks.
The shift
The shift
From announcer to storyteller
Speech doesn't read scripts; she performs them, with the ear for rhythm and phrasing of a lyricist and writer.
Accent as authority
Her voice showed that a working-class London accent could front national and global campaigns, and that audiences trusted it more for its honesty.
Opening the door
Since her first campaign for H&M in 2018, poets, MCs and spoken-word artists have increasingly become the narrative voices of British advertising. Speech helped open that door.
Voice qualities
Voice qualities
Husky
Warm, low and close. It sounds like a conversation, not a sales pitch.
Lyrical
Two decades of writing and performing means every script lands with natural rhythm and pace.
Distinctive
Instantly recognisable, which is why eBay chose it as their brand voice.
Hear the reels
Commercial, documentary and character reels are available through Speech's agent, The Joneses.
Selected work
Selected work
Since her first campaign for H&M in 2018, Speech has voiced work for global brands, national initiatives, documentaries and more. Highlights include:
eBayGoogle PixelfacebookH&MbarclaysASOSMONCLERChannel 4
- Global brands: Google Pixel · Facebook · H&M · eBay (brand voice)
- UK campaigns: Barclays, the surreal "Moneyverse" campaign · ASOS, the "I Stand Out" diversity campaign · Moncler
- National initiatives: Get Into Teaching · National Literacy
- Documentary: Murder in the Alps (Channel 4)
- Animation, VR & apps: Animation alongside Evanna Lynch · Virtual reality projects · Sleep stories for wellbeing apps
Represented by The Joneses. Contact Lizzie Doherty: lizzie@meetthejoneses.co.uk
Music
Where the storytelling began.
In 2009, Speech Debelle's debut album Speech Therapy won the Mercury Prize for British Album of the Year, beating Florence and the Machine, Kasabian and La Roux. Three more albums followed, each one honest, poetic and unmistakably hers. The music is where the voice, the writing and the storytelling all began.
2023Sunday Dinner On A Monday
2017Tantil Before I Breathe
2012Freedom of Speech
2009Mercury Prize winnerSpeech Therapy
Listen
Four albums, four songs
Sunday Dinner On A Monday
2023
"Atlantis"
Tantil Before I Breathe
2017
"The Work"
Freedom of Speech
2012
"Live For The Message"
Speech Therapy
2009 · Mercury Prize winner
"Spinnin'"
Explore the music →
In Development
Ideas taking shape.
I'm always building the next thing. These are the projects in motion right now, and the people I'm looking for to make them happen.
Black Fish - A Short Film
- Stage
- Pre-production · seeking investment
- In place
- Director · producer · Speech Debelle in the lead role · locations · narration from the audiobook
- Looking for
- Investors, film funds and grants, and brand partners who share the film's values
A short film
Black Fish
Releasing what was never hers to carry.
One day on the English coast. A woman, the water, and something she has carried for far too long. Black Fish brings the Penguin Random House book to the screen.
At its heart, Black Fish is about female rage and release: the anger a woman is taught to swallow, and what happens when she finally stops. Over one continuous day she gathers her gear, casts, catches, and sets out on a walk that becomes something else entirely, giving back to the water, on her own terms, a weight that was never hers.
- Female rage and release
- Coming back into the body
- Ancestral connection to water
- Reclaiming the British coast
Request the treatment
Tell us who you are and why this film speaks to you.
The Work Brunch - Season 2
- Stage
- Development · guest longlist
- In place
- Speech Debelle as host, writer and voice · format · a longlist of guests
- Looking for
- A producer, an editor and a researcher, plus funders, platforms and brand partners who share the show's values
A podcast · Season 2
The Work Brunch
The work the rest of us never think to ask about.
In the first season of The Work Brunch, in 2017, we heard from artists and creatives about how they make their work. Guests included Lianne La Havas, singer-songwriter; Caleb Femi, Young People's Laureate for London; Jaja Soze, rapper and former gang leader turned social activist; Eg White, multi-award-winning songwriter and composer; and more.
Season 2 turns the same curiosity on people entirely outside that world, whose consequential work often goes unseen.
The question isn't what the work takes from them. It's what it means to be called to something most people would look away from, and to keep choosing it. Each episode opens on a scene written and voiced by Speech, then hands over to the real person in their own words.
- Invisible work
- Devotion and calling
- Authored storytelling
- Outdoor and coastal access
Request the pitch
Tell us who you are and why this show speaks to you.
Corynne Elliott
Speech Debelle
About
Speech Debelle has always been a storyteller. She's just changed the medium.
Born Corynne Elliott and raised in South London, she first came to national attention in 2009 when her debut album Speech Therapy won the Mercury Prize for British Album of the Year. Three more acclaimed albums followed, along with a reputation for honest, vulnerable writing delivered in an unmistakable voice.
In 2012 she presented Britain's Hidden Homeless for BBC Three, a documentary about young people who are homeless but never counted: sofa-surfing, sleeping rough or living in temporary hostels. Speech returned to the hostel she had lived in ten years earlier, after leaving home, and shared how that time shaped the lyrics of her award-winning music.
Her voice went on to change the sound of British advertising. Since her first campaign for H&M in 2018, Speech has been at the forefront of the move away from polished announcers towards real, rhythmic, conversational voices. She is the brand voice for eBay and has voiced campaigns for Google Pixel, Facebook, Barclays and ASOS, national initiatives including Get Into Teaching, the Channel 4 documentary Murder in the Alps, VR projects, sleep stories, and animation alongside Evanna Lynch.
Over the years she has followed her curiosity wherever it led: reaching the semi-finals of Celebrity MasterChef, hosting the food-and-music podcast The Work Brunch, publishing a cookbook-memoir, and spending three years at Arts Council England, where she led the Black Influencers Masterclass and Programme to open up funding for Black and Brown creatives.
Then she found the water. Speech first picked up a rod at 33, while learning how to be present in her own body and mind. On the UK shoreline, watching the tide and the height of the sun, she found a practice that grounded her and reconnected her with an ancestral relationship to the wata. That led her to co-found We Are Black Fish, a UK community celebrating that connection and growing into a BIPOC voice for the British coast. Today she is training as a volunteer watchkeeper with the National Coastwatch Institution, keeping watch over the coastline and alerting HM Coastguard when people get into trouble at sea.
Her book, Black Fish: How to fish, and stories of the wata, kin & community (Watkins, 2026), brings it all together: a practical guide to fishing, a memoir and a meditation on healing and belonging.
Contact
Get in touch.
Voice over bookings: Lizzie Doherty, The Joneses — lizzie@meetthejoneses.co.uk
Book, film & TV: OWN IT! Agency — Agency@OWNIT.London
We Are Black Fish: hello@weareblackfish.com
Everything else: contact@speechdebelle.com