The Tottenham-hailing author Derek Owusu delves into his influences and shares his thoughts on whether the literary landscape is finally opening up for Black writers

By Miriam Balanescu

For Derek Owusu, whose second novel Losing the Plot was recently longlisted for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize (after his first, That Reminds Me, won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2020) writing is mostly about what he terms “emotional research”.

“A lot of the time it just comes down to being able to sit down with yourself, pull out an emotion and try to get it captured on the page,” Derek said. “It’s an impossible task, but the effort is what I think people feel when they’re reading.

“I know when people hear [emotional research] it might sound strange, but researching your own emotions and the emotions of others is a lot more difficult than reading a 300-page book on a particular subject.”

The former presenter of the Mostly Lit podcast and editor of 2019’s Safe: Black Men Reclaiming Space got stuck into research on African folklore – Anansi the Spider and Brer Rabbit – and religiosity of Pentecostalism for his debut. When it comes to Losing the Plot, however, Derek does not shy away from the fact that it is nearly entirely fabricated – imagination was much more key to illuminating the story.

“The plan was, at the beginning, to try to honour [my mother] in some way. I wanted to maybe write her memoir or something like that, but she was just not interested at all in having her story written down. I don’t know anything about my mum, because she’s very secretive.

“We have a lot of information about what happened in terms of Windrush and the West Africans who came over to the UK,” Derek stated. “We have information, but there’s not enough emotional charge there for me. It just feels like: ‘Okay, this is what happened, but how did these people feel?’ It is due to [our parents] not wanting to disclose any emotional information about what it was like for them back in the day, especially to their children, and it sometimes feels like they just want to forget that time of their life – and I don’t want us to forget.”

Knowing that this would never truthfully be his mother’s narrative was creatively liberating. “Essentially, it’s not my mum’s story,” Derek asserted. “What I felt responsible for was how I was rendering a female character. A lot of male writers are very bad at writing women, very clichéd, they don’t really think about it too much and they are lazy.”

The Desmond Elliott Prize is awarded in special recognition of experimental writing and a fragmentary, sparse and yet internally rich style defines Derek’s work. It is an innovative mode which the author claims is more honest and realistic than the forms we have grown used to: “What we call a traditionally written novel is completely falsified, because nobody tells a story in that way when you’re speaking to them,” he said. “The oral tradition has never been stretched out in that way where every single detail about what’s happening is [there]. The unimportant things are to give the semblance of reality, but, in doing that, what they do is take away because when you remember a day, you don’t remember everything. When you think about a day, you don’t think about everything. You think about it in fragments.”

Derek added: “The reading public, as soon as they hear the word experimental, are put off because they think it means
they’re going to have to work hard. When I pick up a book and it’s 200 pages and I can see there’s a lot of white space on the pages, I get excited because I say to myself: ‘Right, this isn’t going to take me ages to read’. I think a lot of people can relate to that.”

That Reminds Me was the first book published under the Merky Books imprint – founded by Stormzy to ensure more underrepresented voices could be found on bookshop shelves. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Derek became a founding member of the Black Writers’ Guild, which engaged in calling out hypocrisy in the publishing industry and systemic inequality. It’s something which is, Derek said, changing, though only slowly.

“Under close scrutiny, you have to realize that a lot of these books [by Black writers] are being published and then there’s no publicity or marketing behind them, so they just come out and disappear,” he said, adding that many who are successful tend to come from more privileged backgrounds. “Just because there are suddenly people of colour, the old mechanisms still exist for them as well.”

Though Derek said he cannot trace much of a writing community back to Tottenham, as a place it has got deep under his skin. “Broadwater Farm in Tottenham was a kind of proxy for me,” Derek explained. “It was a kind of way to connect with Ghanaian culture without actually being on the continent – so it’s very important to me and probably all of my books are going to be based in Tottenham in one way or another.”

Knowing the writer, who started out as a personal trainer, is a big Beyoncé fan, I asked him whether he was excited about her upcoming performance: “In my head, it doesn’t feel like Beyoncé is coming to Tottenham. It just feels like she’s going to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – and then bouncing. Back in the day, there was this nightclub in Tottenham called Temple and Usher performed there. I remember the day he was going to perform, any limo that drove past on the high road or near our school, every kid would say: ‘Usher’s in that car!’” He also recalled hearing rumours about Destiny’s Child roaming Finsbury Park in search of hair-care products.

Having focused his two novels so far on characters vaguely resembling himself, then his mother, Derek will turn his gaze towards his father next. After that, he doesn’t know where his pen will take him : “When you’re really flowing, you’re really creating worlds and people and feelings and everything is just working, it does feel like how a superhero feels, like you’re doing something otherworldly.”

Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu is available now in bookshops and the winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize will be announced on Thursday, 11th May

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