Derek Owusu

Derek Owusu is the author of the phenomenal That Reminds Me, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2019. 

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, and his essay on language was picked up by BBC Newsnight to be turned into a short documentary.

We are proud to say that when we hosted Owusu in 2020 for That Reminds Me, it was the first bookshop event that he had ever done. Now he rejoins us for his highly-anticipated new novel Losing The Plot. 

Driven by a deep-seated desire to understand his mother’s life before he was born, Derek Owusu offers a powerful imagining of her journey. As she moves from Ghana to the UK and navigates parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment, the effects of displacement are felt across generations.

Told through the eyes of both mother and son, Losing the Plot is at once emotionally raw and playful as 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.