An Interview with Kit de Waal (2026)
Elleke Boehmer
In an online conversation that Elleke Boehmer held with the author for the Oxford Centre for Life Writing on 12 May 2026, as part of its Global and Underrepresented Minorities programme, Kit de Waal gave interesting insights into the making of her fictions and their widely praised relatability.
First and foremost, she said several times that, in her writing, she’s interested in exploring how ‘everybody has a secret, everyone has experienced shame and envy and a broken heart. There’s something just out of reach for most people, something they wish they did, … some words they wish they’d said, and that’s extraordinary. I mean, that is what makes the world go round, the interplay between people, much more so than events, because events only happen because of people and people’s decisions.’
De Waal pointed out that none of us should let the ‘big’ events overwhelm the days that are marked with our ordinary joys and sorrows, such as when our birthday might fall on the day, say, that a war breaks out. In fact, everyone harbours ‘a magnificent story’, and the value of writing it down is that this prevents the story from being forgotten and overlooked.
While both fiction and memoir preserve memory, Kit de Waal said, the difference between them is that fiction gives more licence to pick out and illuminate important moments. Even so, she emphasized at several points in the interview, ‘there are so many different ways to tell a life.’ Memoir shows us that the writer has found their way through the experience they’re talking about, that they’ve reflected on it and made sense of it. The American writer, James Baldwin, put the importance of such writing this way: ‘I don’t often know what I believe until I’ve had to write about it.’
Kit de Waal also opened an intriguing window onto how she writes her stories. When she is writing a scene, she explained, she inhabits the room, the moment: ‘Be with the person undergoing the thing,’ she said. ‘So, are they scared? Be scared. Feel that visceral fear, [ask] where am I feeling it? In my chest? … What time is it? And where’s the light coming into the room? And who else is there? And the more that you can immerse yourself in the scene, be in the room, be in the coat, be wearing the uncomfortable shoes, the better your writing will be.’
In this way, she emphasized, the writer shows respect to the reader, bringing them onto the same side as the character.
Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke. “An Interview with Kit de Waal (2026).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2026, https://writersmakeworlds.com/interview-kit-de-waal. Accessed 12 July 2026.