Tracy King’s memoir Learning to Think is a heartbreaking but hopeful story which holds a mirror to the realities of growing up in poverty in the UK. She will be talking to award-winning author Kit de Waal, whose memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes tells of her own chaotic upbringing in1960s Birmingham, about the transformative power of books and of learning to think for yourself. This event will be chaired by forthcoming memoirist Yvonne Jewkes.
Tracy King is a writer, producer and science communicator based in England. She has contributed to media on subjects ranging from science and technology to politics and videogames, for the BBC and in the Guardian, Telegraph, the New Statesman, Stylist and the New European amongst others. She was a columnist for Custom PC magazine for over ten years. Her science and critical-thinking animations include a collaboration with Tim Minchin, Storm, which has five million views on YouTube and was adapted into a bestselling graphic novel. Her television and radio credits include Sky News, BBC Newsnight, Good Morning Britain and BBC Sounds.
Kit de Waal’s childhood in 1960s Birmingham was anything but ordinary, growing up with a mother who banned Christmas and birthdays and a father who splurged money he didn’t have on cars and fancy shoes. Caught between three worlds, Irish, Caribbean and British, she reflects on a chaotic upbringing of opposites and extremes in her memoir, Without Warning and Only Sometimes.
Yvonne Jewkes is author of An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the Prison, Restoring a House, Rebuilding Myself (Scribe, Sept 2024), described by Jennie Godfrey (author of The List of Suspicious Things) as a ‘deeply vulnerable, beautifully written personal memoir… a triumph’, and by Joe Moran (author of First You Write a Sentence) as a book ‘full of hard-won authority and expertise conveyed in tenderly human ways.
