Tessa McWatt: Shame On Me (Launch)

Join us for an evening to mark the launch of this timely and brilliant new book from a UEA professor of Creative Writing.

Tessa McWatt knows first-hand that the answer to this question, often asked of people of colour by white people, is always more complicated than it seems. Is the answer English, Scottish, British, Caribbean, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, French, African, Chinese, Canadian? Like most families, hers is steeped in myth and the anecdotes of grandparents and parents who view their histories through the lens of desire, aspiration, loss, and shame.

In Shame On Me she unspools all the interwoven strands of her inheritance, and knits them back together using additional fibres from literature and history to strengthen the weave of her refabricated tale. She dismantles her own body and examines it piece by piece to build a devastating and incisively subtle analysis of the race debate as it now stands, in this stunningly written exploration of who and what we truly are.

For those of you who missed her on Start The Week on the 7th of October, listen in here:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000935s

This is one of The Book Hive’s standout books of the year, and at this event Tessa will be in conversation with Rebecca Stott, author of the Costa Award winning In The Days of Rain.