Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among the
Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the
Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry
Group 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. She is a patron of Prisoners Abroad, ambassador of Well-being in the
Arts and a trustee of The Reading Agency.
Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor and Jean Humphreys
Writer in Residence at University of Leicester.
Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022.