Kanya King has a fantastic laugh. It is halfway between witch's cackle and end-of-the-pier saucy chuckle. It has a habit of breaking out during any extended conversation with the 38-year-old entrepreneur.

The laugh could be a safety valve for the pressures of her job. Ms King, founder of the Music of Black Origin Awards, has to tiptoe around a mountain of controversy. The Mobos, the 13th of which is celebrated at Wembley Arena tonight, has a history of rubbing people up the wrong way.

The Mobos has been accused of being too black, creating a ghetto for musicians who should be celebrated by the Brit Awards. It has been condemned for being too white - for example, in nominating the Welsh songstress Duffy this year. And it got into even hotter water in 2004 for accepting the nominations of the Jamaican dance hall stars Elephant Man and Vybz Kartel. The homophobic content of their acts made them unpopular with gay rights campaigners.

Ms King responds elliptically to a neutrally phrased question about the impossibility of pleasing all of the people all of the time. This year, she says, the awards have been steered by a "taste-maker panel" that includes journalists, DJs and TV people. That sounds like an admission that mistakes had been made before and that greater scrutiny of categories and nominees was needed. Her justification of the Mobos remains that when an obscure black British musician is nominated for a Mobo, "it can phenomenally change their career".

The awards are in fact a cunning exercise in promoting crossover. They put grime stars such as Dizzee Rascal, a muscly young black man who raps about inner city violence and teenage pregnancy, on stage with such zero-threat soul-lite cuties as Joss Stone. The Mobos itself is a crossover business. Many black-owned businesses in the UK cater primarily to the UK's relatively small black population. The Mobos, whose broadcasters include the BBC, attracts an audience of millions of Britons, whose "endz" are quite likely to be a leafy suburban close.

Ms King says: "What we were saying with the term 'Mobos' was that popular music today has its origins in black heritage. We just wanted to celebrate and commemorate that fact. It's very much an inclusive event." It is also, she says, a profitable one, but will not be drawn on figures beyond saying turnover is less than £5m.

Ms King is one of nine children of an Ghanaian father and an Irish mother who met in 1960s London when, as she puts it, "there were signs on doors that said: 'No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs'". The fact that her parents were not dog-owners, she mordantly observes, was the only element of her parents' identity bringing them any social acceptance.

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"My father died when I was 13 years old, on Friday 13 at midnight, and I think that was a very pivotal moment for me," she says. He was in hospital in Paddington with "all these tubes and wires everywhere". After a family visit had ended, she was seized by an impulse to run back on to the ward. She says: "He told me, 'Just be the best you can be,' and those were his very last words to me."

Ms King grew up wearing clothes bought at jumble sales. She had a son, Jem, while she was still young, and was kicked off her English and drama course at Goldsmiths College in London, where a huge culture gap separated her from the other students. She then ran into Chrystal Rose, an actor and model who was financing a pilot chat show for Carlton TV with her own money. Ms King wound up working on the show as a researcher, then went to Clarke Television Productions, where she booked celebrities such as Lennox Lewis, the boxer. She was, she recalls, "very, very persistent".

She was also puzzled. British music awards at that time mostly seemed to involve red-faced industry executives dishing out lifetime achievement awards to Fleetwood Mac. The soul and hip-hop that she loved did not get a look-in. Surely this was an opportunity? She approached events organisers: "I was told there wasn't an audience out there."

That seemed like a challenge. Ms King launched the awards herself from the bedroom of her remortgaged house, with the help of her network of showbusiness contacts and her access to black ­celebrities.

She invited Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition. She was rebuffed. She kept on inviting him. Mr Blair duly turned up to the first event in 1996, at the Connaught Rooms, a small London venue. Her mother, Mary King, asked the future prime minister to give her daughter a proper job.

Since then, music underpinned by R&B, gospel and hip-hop has moved into the mainstream. Running the Mobos has turned out to be a proper job after all. The event now takes place at big venues such as Wembley and the O2 arena.

"We have gone from a live audience of 500 to 12,000," Ms King says. "The show also has a TV audience of up to 250m people, because it is syndicated all around the world."

The entrepreneur is appropriately glamorous, with big hair and ankle-boots. She somewhat resembles a younger Diana Ross, a star guest at the 2003 Mobos. Ms King greatly admires the soul queen, who on that occasion belied her reputation for prima donna tantrums, she says.

What next? Ms King wants to expand beyond a yearly awards event based in the UK. She is discussing a deal with a big US media company, which her company, the Mobo Organisation, would provide with content. The business appears to be becoming more conventionally managerial, as entrepreneurial start-ups are apt to. A couple of years ago Ms King recruited Terry Mansfield, former head of The National Magazine Company, publisher of titles such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, as chairman. Ms King wants to be less hands-on, more of an ambassador, she says.

Ms King's role model has in the past been reported to be Oprah Winfrey. But today she says simply that her mum and dad fill that slot. She spells out the surname of the father who died in that Paddington hospital all those years ago - O, C, L, O, O - just for the record. And unleashes that fantastic laugh one last time.