Derek Owusu

This November, we are very proud to welcome 2019’s Desmond Elliot Winner, Derek Owusu, to our Edinburgh bookshop.

He joins us to discuss his new novel Losing the Plot, which offers a powerful imagining of Derek’s mother’s emigration to the UK from Ghana. Told through the eyes of both mother and son, Losing the Plot navigates parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment and highlights the often forgotten fact that displacement is felt across generations. At once emotionally raw and playful, Owusu experiments with form to piece together the immigrant experience and explore how the stories we share and tell ourselves are just as vital as the ones we don’t.

So come join us in celebrating one of Britain’s finest and most admirable young authors!

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Derek Owusu is a writer, poet and podcaster from north London. He is part of the multi-award winning literature podcast Mostly Lit, and produced the well-received This Is Spoke. He collated, edited and contributed to the book SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space. His first novel, That Reminds Me, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction, the judges praising it as a ‘transcendent work of literature.’ In 2020, Owusu was one of the founding members of the Black Writers Guild, whose formation was due to the lack of representation and inequalities that exist within mainstream publishing in the UK. And in that same year he was a Book of Man ‘Man of The Year’ for his writing and mental health advocacy.