ABOUT
Brian Kokoruwe
Born in London, Brian Kokoruwe spent the early part of his life in Nigeria, West Africa. After becoming deafened following meningitis when 13-years old, he relocated back to England to continue his education and he started in a Partially Hearing Unit in a Comprehensive School. The meningitis left him unable to walk. With the aid of daily physiotherapist session and extra self-training, he not only regained the ability to walk again, but he was selected to be the Captain of his School’s Athletics and Cross Country Teams.
After leaving school, he went on to college and then to the university where he was also Athletics and Cross Country Captain. Following his graduation from University with a Business degree, he undertook various roles, including within the fashion, legal, government and financial corporations. To further develop his career, he undertook a Post Graduate Management degree and worked as a Senior Business Analyst for a major Bank taking a leading role in a £1m project. His interest then swerved into working with deaf people. He spent some time setting up new systems in his local deaf club and worked as a project manager for a research project looking at GPs and Hospital Health Access Provisions for Deaf People in North-West England. This project won a major award for the Most Useful Consumers’ project in North-West England and was invited to the House of Parliament to pick up the award. At the end of the project, he set up the UK Disabled People’s Movement Archive project for a major organisation of disabled people.
Brian has competed in deaf and non-deaf athletics competitions. Following the disappointment of GB track and field athletics in the 2001 Deaf Olympics Games in Rome, Brian decided to set up Deaf UK Athletics. Since then as Director of Deaf UK Athletics, he has established a pool of high calibre GB deaf athletes who have won medals at the European, World and Deaflympic Championships as well as holding world records. More recently, Brian was selected as a Batonbearer for the Birmingham 2022 Queen’s Baton Relay in the Commonwealth Games.
Brian is currently working on his fourth book, which will be be following on from his previous autobiograhical accounts of his early life.
Books one and two ‘When Mother Cried’ and ‘My Father Tried’; these both give readers an insight into the roles both of his parents played in his life from sending him on a plane from London to Lagos to coping with his meningitis infection. ‘Deaf Not Dumb Or Stupid’ is the third part in Brian’s series of autobigraphies on his life which he officially launched in Newcastle -under-Lyme on the 18th of July 2022. His latest book follows adolescent Brian’s journey from schooling in Nigeria to an – at the time – unbeknownst place to him: London.
