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 13 July 2026.

The post An Interview with Kit de Waal (2026) appeared first on writers make worlds.

Overview

Born in Birmingham, the child of a Caribbean father and an Irish mother, the novelist and memoirist Kit de Waal made her name with her debut novel, My Name is Leon (2016). This international bestseller looks at intersections of family and community through the eyes of the smart and worried ten-year-old boy Leon.

Kit de Waal has gone on to produce a range of other immersive works that explore the lives of characters whose dreams are expansive, though their circumstances are often restricted and painful. She considers how seemingly ordinary lives all carry extraordinary qualities, and also what writing about ‘little’ lives has to say to some of the big questions we all confront, such as: in families, what does it mean to love each other?; and, more broadly, what is it to be in connection with one another?

In her work, de Waal draws on her fifteen years’ working in criminal and family law, and her own mother’s experience as a foster carer. Memorable and keen-eyed observations shape the portraits of de Waal’s short-story collection, Supporting Cast (2020), and of the pale and mysterious boy Nellie in her 2025 novel, The Best of Everything (2025). From their different perspectives, her fictions all ponder questions of race, belonging, motherhood, loss, recovery and regeneration, as, too, does her hard-hitting and heartrending memoir, Without warning and only sometimes (2022).

Kit de Waal’s work has received major recognition in Britain, Ireland and more widely. My Name is Leon was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2017. In 2025 it was adapted as a film for BBC2. 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. Without warning and only sometimes was shortlisted for the Irish Biography of the Year Award. De Waal also crowdfunded and edited an anthology of working-class memoir, Common People.

Packed with Caribbean cooking flavours and 1970s memorabilia, her 2025 novel, The Best of Everything, sees the central character Paulette struggle in stop-start stages to rebuild her life after a completely unexpected and unusually shocking loss. Like My Name is Leon, the story makes a propulsive impact on the reader, as the joys and sorrows of the black auxiliary nurse Paulette are woven into the fabric of life in 1980s Birmingham. The narrative takes the reader into the heart of her predicaments where we at one and the same time observe the dilemmas confronting her, but also feel with her, from her point of view. The novel was long-listed for the Women’s Prize 2025. 

—Elleke Boehmer, 2026

Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke. “Kit de Waal.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/kitdewaal. Accessed 13 July 2026.

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