Novelist Kit de Waal has set up a scholarship to give marginalised people opportunities in creative writing
The literary critic Cyril Connolly once said “the pram in the corridor” is the enemy of respectable art. Novelist Kit de Waal found the opposite was true. “I wasn’t one of those people who always wanted to write – I started writing seriously when I was 45. I’d adopted my second child,and had time at domestic.”But then, the 55-year-traditional’s route to becoming a published author was not traditional. She left school at 15 with no qualifications and became a secretary at the Crown Prosecution Service, or but within six years was doing the work of an unqualified solicitor. “I saw everything: theft,murders, rapes and serious robberies. I learned enormous compassion and empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own), or saw the way people are funneled into a life of crime and an area where you gain very different life chances and life choices available to you. Lots of people talk about ‘the criminal class’; well,whether you arrive from a class where you’re the fourth or fifth generation in poverty, or crime, and there isn’t that same stigma attached to it,” she says. “I don’t cast aspersions on people who live those lives: people survive, and they will survive any way they can with the means available to them.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com