Literary Friction - Know Your Place with Kit de Waal + Nathan Connolly + Abondance Matanda

Literary Friction

Arts

4.9 • 593 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2017

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After Brexit - the supposed ‘will of the people’ - everyone is talking about the working class. And yet the actual voice of the working class is rarely heard, especially in literature. This month, we have a very special edition of Literary Friction based around a new collection of essays on the working class by the working class called Know Your Place, published by the brilliant gang at Dead Ink Books. We talked to three authors featured in the collection about their essays and the urgent need to publish more diverse voices: award-winning novelist Kit de Waal; the editor and publisher of Know Your Place, Nathan Connolly; and London-based writer and poet Abondance Matanda.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright. Hi, Octavia.
0:12.0	Hi, Carrie. After Brexit, the supposed will of the people, everyone is talking about the working class.
0:18.0	And yet the actual voice of the working class is rarely heard, especially in literature.
0:22.6	This month, we have a very special edition of literary friction based around a new collection of essays on the working class by the working class called Know Your Place.
0:31.6	And instead of the usual format, we're going to be talking to three authors featured in the collection.
0:35.6	First up, we're going to talk to Kit Deval.
0:38.6	Kit is the author of debut novel. My name is Leon, a Times and International Bestseller,
0:42.9	which was shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award. Her essay in Know Your Place is titled
0:47.2	What Happened to Working Class Writers? Thank you so much for being with us today, Kit.
0:52.5	Hello, hi. It's great to be here. So we wanted to start by
0:57.3	asking you about your debut novel. My name is Leon, which was published last year. Could you talk a little bit
1:02.9	about your road to publication? Because we know you didn't start writing until a bit later in your life,
1:08.1	and you mentioned this in the essay in Know Your Place,
1:16.0	how you kind of came to your voice. So yeah, just we'd love to hear a little bit more about that.
1:28.0	Sure. So I started writing entirely when I was in my mid-40s, being sort of trapped at home with a young child.
1:34.8	And I started writing things that were like the things that I enjoyed reading. So sort of Goodfellas, you know, films, mafia films, bad guy films, thrillers, film noir, because that's what I,
1:47.3	that's what I watched on telly, that's the sort of films that I watched, they're the books
1:51.3	that I read. But actually, it wasn't the sort of story that came from my heart. It was definitely
1:57.4	a story that came from my head. So I then, after those two books that I first wrote were rejected,
2:05.2	I wrote my name is Leon really quite quickly because it pulled on lots of my background.
2:12.8	I'm mixed race.
2:14.1	It was about a mixed race boy.
	...

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