Kit de Waal is a bestselling novelist born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was an
international bestseller and adapted for television by the BBC. It is on the GCSE curriculum for schools. Kit founded the Big Book
Weekend, a free digital literary festival in 2020 and has written for theatre and television. She was named the FutureBook Person of the Year 2019 and is patron of Prisoners Abroad, The Bridport Prize and Writing West Midlands. She is also an ambassador for Wellbeing in the Arts and the Listening Books, on the Advisory Board of Dead Ink Books and a trustee of The Reading Agency. Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor and Jean Humphreys Writer in Residence at Leicester University.