Stella Dadzie is a founder member of OWAAD and is best known for The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1985), which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature, and which she co-authored with Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe. Dadzie was born in London to a white English mother and Ghanaian father, who was the first trained pilot in Ghana and after joining the RAF and flew as a navigator in missions over Belgium during the Second World War. Dadzie was in foster care in Wales for about 18 months, before being returned to her mother at the age of four. Interviewed in 2020, Dadzie said: "We experienced poverty, homelessness and racism – my mother was ostracised as she had a black child and was a single parent. We moved around London a huge amount, as we were constantly getting thrown out by racist landlords. There was a lot of pain and suffering." Dadzie did not meet her father and siblings until she was 12.