Kanya King, the founder of the MOBO Awards, has died at 57 after a battle with colon cancer. The Mobo Organisation said she died peacefully on June 3, surrounded by her family, close friends and love.
For many readers searching her name today, the reason is plain: King built one of the UK’s best-known music honours from nothing and turned it into a national institution. The awards she created in 1996 helped push Black music and culture into the mainstream, and in doing so gave artists including Amy Winehouse, Stormzy, Olivia Dean, Raye and So Solid Crew a stage that carried far beyond the ceremony itself.
The organisation described her death as the end of “a courageous and characteristically determined battle with colon cancer,” but the scale of what she created is what will define her. Thirty years ago, King remortgaged her home, alone and without institutional backing, to build the awards stage. Six weeks later, the first MOBO Awards was broadcast to the nation. That gamble turned a night of recognition into a fixture of British cultural life.
King’s rise was all the more striking because she was told Black music was too niche, that there was no market and that the industry was not interested. She was a single mother from a Kilburn council estate when she set up the awards, and the response from the Mobo Organisation captures how she answered those doubts: “Instead of arguing, she built.”
What remains unresolved is the immediate future of the awards she made. The organisation has not set out any public plans following her death, but it has already framed her legacy in sweeping terms, saying Mobo did not just celebrate Black music; it legitimised it, amplified it, and showed its commercial and creative power to a country that had too often chosen not to see it.
