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Kit de Waal in conversation with Douglas Stuart

Without Warning and Only Sometimes

Hay Festival 2023, 

Kit de Waal turns her writer’s lens on herself for the first time, with her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes: Scenes from an Unpredictable Childhood. In conversation with Booker Prize-winner Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo), de Waal gives a warm-hearted glimpse into her life growing up in a household of opposites and extremes: her mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder and believed the world would end in 1975, while her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn't have. De Waal tells an extraordinary story of an apparently ordinary life.

Kit de Waal in conversation with Douglas Stuart