Kit de Waal

Her mother, Sheila O'Loughlin (née Doyle), was a foster carer, registered child minder and auxiliary nurse.

[5] Her short-story collection Supporting Cast, featuring the lives of secondary characters from her novels, was published by Penguin in 2020.

[9] As well as being published in anthologies (such as Margaret Busby's 2019 New Daughters of Africa),[10] de Waal's work has been broadcast on radio, including her story "Adrift at the Athena", which was commissioned for the anthology A Midlands Odyssey by Nine Arches Press,[5] and "The Beautiful Thing" – "about emigration, backstory and new beginnings" – was read on BBC Radio 4 by Burt Caesar.

[11] She has written about the need for the publishing industry to be more inclusive,[12] and on 22 November 2017 she presented the BBC Radio 4 programme Where Are All the Working Class Writers?

"[15] In March 2020, de Waal co-founded with Molly Flatt a three-day virtual books festival called "The Big Book Weekend", broadcast live across three days over the first bank holiday weekend in May as part of BBC Arts "Culture In Quarantine" programming.

[16][17] Three days after winning a publishing deal for My Name Is Leon, she began setting up a scholarship for a writer from a disadvantaged background.