LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 56

And most of all, how am I going to be true to any child who’s been in
care?”
But the novel was an instant hit with publishers. “It was incredible,” De
Waal says, wide-eyed. Her agent sent it out on a Monday, and “by
Wednesday we had an offer that I was floored by. I was like, ‘sign it,
sign it, sign it – before they change their minds!’” Wisely, De Waal’s
agent suggested she hold back, and soon her book was at the centre of a
six-way auction. “I think people responded to it because it’s a story
about a part of society a lot of people don’t think about,” De Waal
suggests.
Set in early 80s inner-city Britain, My Name Is Leon balances the gritty
with the feelgood; De Waal knew early on that, among the grimness of
life as a foster child, there had to be an element of positivity for Leon
and for readers. Indeed, Leon’s view of the adults who surround him (in
their varying disengaged, awkward, angry, drunk, or lonely states) is
perceptive, and, on occasion, startlingly funny. De Waal has a knack for
being comical: midway through our interview, she gets up from her
chair, hitches up her trousers and crouches to show me how she would
get down to Leon’s height when writing to better understand his
viewpoint. Even her name embodies her youthful playfulness: Kit is a
family nickname she acquired in childhood when she would pronounce
St Kitts (where her father is from) “St Kiths”.
Recently, De Waal announced that she would fund a scholarship for a
person from a marginalised background to do a creative writing MA at
Birkbeck. It’s a way of getting more diverse stories – “which are legion,
and don’t often get told” – published, she says. “I wanted to call it the
Fat Chance scholarship, because so many people who I’ve suggested
should do an MA, say: ‘Fat chance – haven’t got the money!’ My
father’s black, my mum’s Irish, and growing up poor, in an all-white
neighbourhood, in the 60s, there was rabid racism. Doing an MA for me
was a dream, and I wanted to give someone like me that
opportunity.” CJ
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