LitFest loves to champion new writers as well as established names at the festival and over the years we’ve been lucky enough to welcome authors in the early part of their careers including Bernardine Evaristo, Stacey Halls, Barney Norris and Claire Fuller. This year’s annual Hiscox Debut Authors slot on Saturday 1 October will champion the emerging talent of Ayanna Banwo and Bobby Palmer, talking about their debut novels, ‘When We Were Birds’ and ‘Isaac and the Egg’ respectively.
Their paths to novel-writing could not have been more different. Bobby Palmer went to school in Hertfordshire and has worked as a copywriter and a freelance journalist, with articles including ‘One month as a male stripper’ and ‘Adventures in Mexican wrestling’. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo grew up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, moved to the UK five years ago and studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Each has garnered rave reviews for their first novel. Palmer’s ‘Isaac and the Egg’ is, according to novelist Patrick Gale, “a mad, sad, funny debut” in which a young man walks into the woods on the worst morning of his life and discovers something that will change everything for ever. All human experience is here: love, hope, grief… and baked beans. While love looms large in Lloyd Banwo’s ‘When We Were Birds’, the novel is also a ghost story: the two central characters are a gravedigger and a woman who, so her grandmother tells her, has been transformed from a crow to escort the dead into the afterlife. Small wonder that the author revealed in The Observer that the biggest influence on her writing was the oral storytelling of women in her home: “My grandmother told stories like it was breath.”