Without Warning and Only Sometimes: Kit De Waal In Conversationa

Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among theIrish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for theCosta First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the KerryGroup 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 FutureBook Person of the Year 2019.
Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor and Writer in Residence at Leicester University. Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022.

Iman Amrani is an ward-winning freelance journalist, producer and presenter. She has worked mostly on contemporary political and social documentaries or videos, as well as writing profiles and features. Iman has previously worked with The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Vogue Portugal, The Independent, The New Statesman, Square Mile, Raconteur (business supplement distributed in The Times), Huffington Post and Copa90.