Kit de Waal: ‘Writing’s very solitary – you do it because you want to find readers’
The acclaimed novelist on how her working-class roots inform her writing and her food choices
When Kit de Waal’s first novel, My Name is Leon, was published to proper acclaim three years ago, she happened to mention in an interview how few writers from her kind of background there were in Britain. That comment was – like the ongoing debate about the absence of working-class voices in film and theatre – seized upon by commentators and De Waal quickly found herself presented in the literary pages as the authentic voice of working-class Britain. She grew up in Birmingham, one of five children of an Irish child-minder mum and a Caribbean bus-driver dad. She subsequently worked for many years in criminal and family law, latterly as a magistrate and as an advisor to social services on adoption; she was 51 when she took time out to do a creative writing MA and 55 when My Name is Leon was published.
De Waal has used her new platform to become a visible and irrepressible advocate for wider access to the publishing world for both writers and readers. She gave some of her publisher’s advance for that first book to establish a full annual scholarship on the creative writing course at Birkbeck College for a writer from a low-income background. And after her second novel, The Trick to Time, was published last year she was invited to lead a project to discover new working-class voices, in conjunction with regional arts agencies, for an anthology and support programme.