Kit de Waal

Kit de Waal is a British-Irish author whose fiction and memoir explore class, race, family, and belonging with tenderness and unflinching honesty. Born in Birmingham in 1960 to an Irish mother and a Caribbean father, she worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, including adoption and child protection, before becoming a writer in her fifties. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon, about a mixed-race boy separated from his baby brother by the care system, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her other works include The Trick to Time, Becoming Dinah (a young adult novel), and the memoir Without Warning & Only Sometimes. She is also the editor of Common People, an anthology by working-class writers, and the founder of a creative writing scholarship for underprivileged writers at Birkbeck, University of London. De Waal's work consistently champions voices and stories from working-class and mixed-race communities. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers powerful, compassionate fiction that illuminates lives too often overlooked, told with the insight of someone who has spent years working within systems that shape families.