Â鶹Éç

Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and Kittian father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law and writes about the urban underbelly, forgotten and overlooked places.

She writes short stories and flash fiction and has just finished her first novel. She won the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction in 2014, came second in the Costa Short Story Prize 2014 with ‘The Old Man & The Suit’, second in the Bath Short Story Prize 2014 with ‘The Beautiful Thing’ and was longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize 2014. 

"I hadn’t read the Odyssey – it’s one of those great works I always thought I would get around to one day – but fragments had survived from school and bits of films I’d seen. I’d heard snatches of it and knew that James Joyce’s Ulysses was loosely based on the story, so when I was commissioned to write a re-imagined chapter in a contemporary setting, I jumped at the chance. 

I chose not to read any interpretations and academic studies but read the Nausicaa episode to see what I made of it and found that there were parallels with something I already had in mind, sitting on my shoulder, waiting to be written.  It was about a man and a launderette and contained a lot of the elements that fitted Nausicaa’s story – journeying, water, desire and restraint.  Although my chapter is written from a male perspective, I think it is Nausicaa’s story and every woman’s story. Mother, carer, sister, confessor, lover, wife – these are the roles we adopt in life, often within a single relationship.  I hope I have done us justice."

Kit de Waal’s Adrift at the Athena is one of three stories adapted for Â鶹Éç Radio 4's Shorts: Writing West from the short story collection A Midlands Odyssey, commissioned by Writing West Midlands and published by Nine Arches Press in October 2014. The editors of the anthology were Polly Stoker, Elisabeth Charis and Jonathan Davidson.