Brandon Taylor never expected to become a novelist. “I expected to cure Alzheimer’s disease,” he tells me when we meet at Notes café in King’s Cross. Having been enrolled in a graduate biochemistry programme at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Taylor hadn’t imagined that there was more that he could do with his life. “I had always written little stories, but I very much viewed that as a side thing.” But Taylor’s studies had been thrown into crisis when his experiments were failing, and he was told by his adviser that he may have to leave the lab if he was unable to make them work. “And so I thought, well, I need a back-up plan. And my back-up plan was to apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. So one day I mailed some stories to them and hoped for the best. And then I got in and had to make this choice of do I stay or do I go? I realised that I could live without science, but I tried to imagine a life where I wasn’t also writing and it was too painful.”
Departing from his doctoral programme in 2016 has, of course, paid off for Taylor. He’s since become something of a literary superstar, releasing three books, two novels and a collection of short stories, within four years. His Booker-shortlisted debut novel, Real Life, set over a summer weekend, focused on a black gay biochemistry student, Wallace, and his disconnection with his Midwestern university town and his barbed interactions with his white friends and colleagues.
