Following a thought provoking and entertaining appearance in WoWFest 19, Writing on the Wall welcome back international bestselling author, Kit De Waal for an online conversation on her new memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes, described by The Sunday Times as ‘Extraordinary, moving and heart-warming’. Kit will be discussing her working-class roots and how they have informed her writing.
Kit will be in conversation with WoW’s Project Manager Janaya Pickett, who is managing WoW’s Creative Heritage work on the archive of Dorothy Kuya at National Museums Liverpool.
Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017.
In 2022 it was adapted for television by the BBC. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. A collection of short stories, Supporting Cast was published in 2020. An anthology of working-class memoir, Common People was crowdfunded and edited by Kit in 2019.
Kit founded her own TV production company, Portopia Productions and the Big Book Weekend, a free digital literary festival in 2020 and was named the Future Book Person of the Year 2019. Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor and Writer in Residence at Leicester University