Kanya King CBE, the entrepreneur who remortgaged her home to launch the MOBO Awards and went on to reshape the British music industry, has died aged 57.
following what the MOBO Organisation described as “a courageous and characteristically determined battle with colon cancer”.
King died peacefully on 3 June, “surrounded by her family, close friends and love”, the organisation said in a statement.
Her story remains one of the most remarkable in British enterprise. A single mother raised on a Kilburn council estate, King was repeatedly told in the mid-1990s that Black music was too niche, that there was no market for it, and that the industry simply wasn’t interested. Unable to secure institutional backing, a barrier that, as Business Matters has reported, still sees only 2 per cent of venture funding reach female and ethnic minority founders, she bet the roof over her head on her own conviction.
“Instead of arguing, she built,” the MOBO statement said. “Six weeks later, the first MOBO Awards was broadcast to the nation, and nothing was ever the same again.”
That first ceremony in 1996 grew into a national institution that championed artists including Stormzy, Amy Winehouse, Raye, Olivia Dean and So Solid Crew, many of them long before mainstream industry events would give them a platform.
“What Kanya created was never simply an awards ceremony. It was an act of cultural justice,” the organisation said. “MOBO did not just celebrate Black music; it legitimised it, amplified it, and demonstrated its commercial and creative power to a world that had too often chosen not to see it.”
King’s contribution was formally recognised when she was appointed CBE in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and in 2025 she received one of the Ivors Academy’s inaugural Honours, alongside Raye and Sir Richard Branson. Earlier this year she was shortlisted for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award, recognising three decades spent growing MOBO from a niche celebration into a global cultural platform.
She refused to step back even after her diagnosis. Just months on from learning she had cancer, King appeared on stage at last year’s MOBO Awards in Newcastle, telling the audience: “I never allowed someone to define my limits. Not in life. Not in business. And I’m certainly not going to have that happen now.”
King’s family said in a statement that she “faced every moment of her illness as she faced every moment of her life: with courage, with faith, with humour, and with an absolute refusal to be diminished”.
“Kanya leaves behind 30 years of music, of joy, of resistance, of proof — proof that one woman, with vision, nerve, and love, can move an entire culture,” they added. “We are broken. We are grateful. We are so profoundly, endlessly proud to have been her family.”
Tributes poured in from across public life. Idris Elba said King was gone “too soon”, adding: “You inspired me. Your dedication is unmatched.” The Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, called her a “true pioneer” who “changed the face of culture and music”, while Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said she had “changed British music for the better through the MOBO Awards”.
The MOBO Organisation said the world was a “profoundly better place” for King having been in it. “The MOBO family is heartbroken, but also endlessly grateful, proud and inspired by everything she gave to music, culture and the generations who will follow in her footsteps.
