#145: Kit de Waal, novelist and short-story writer

Rachel and Simon speak with the novelist and short-story writer Kit de Waal. Born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and a Caribbean father, she worked for several years in criminal and family law, sitting on adoption panels and writing manuals on foster care. Her experience in this field informed her debut novel, "My Name is Leon", which was published in 2016 after a six-way auction and was adapted into a television film this year. Kit has also worked to increase diversity in publishing, using some of her advance from "My Name is Leon" to fund a creative-writing scholarship and editing "Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers" in 2019. We spoke to Kit at Wimbledon BookFest about getting published for the first time in her 50s, about class and publishing and "Without Warning and Only Sometimes", her new memoir.