We are excited to announce that best-selling author Kit de Waal has joined Wellbeing in the Arts as an Ambassador.
Kit’s debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and winner of the 2017 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. In 2022, it was adapted for television by the BBC.
Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the 2020 Carnegie CLIP Award. Her short story collection, Supporting Cast, was published in 2020, while Common People, a crowdfunded and self-edited anthology of working-class memoirs, was released in 2019 to wide acclaim.
Beyond her writing, Kit founded Portopia Productions and launched Big Book Weekend in 2020 — a free digital literary festival created to support readers, writers and the publishing industry during the pandemic. She was named FutureBook Person of the Year in 2019, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and serves as Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Leicester.
Her memoir, Without Warning and Only Sometimes, was published in August 2022, and her latest novel, The Best of Everything, will be released in April 2025.
Speaking about her appointment, Kit said:
“It is a privilege to become an Ambassador for Wellbeing in the Arts, an organisation doing vital work to ensure people across the creative industries can access meaningful mental health support — even when affordability is a barrier. At a time when pressures across the sector continue to grow, this kind of provision has never been more important, and I am proud to support it.”
