Michael Donkor, 39, was born in London to Ghanaian parents. His first novel, Hold (2018), about three teenage girls, was listed for the Dylan Thomas prize and the Desmond Elliott prize. His second, Grow Where They Fall, follows Kwame, a secondary school teacher, which was Donkor’s own job until his recent move to Lisbon, where he now works as a bookseller.
Where did this book begin?
I’d had some experiences – some challenging, some comic – of being in incredibly white environments, and I wondered whether a novel might be a place to think through those experiences. It wasn’t that after publishing Hold I just woke up and was like, OK, now I’m going to write the book about me. Nothing Kwame goes through specifically happened to me. He’s more someone I wished I’d had around in those racially vexed moments when I felt uncertain about what was going on in a room. I thought of him as the person I wanted to see when the headteacher was in the staff room saying: “Oh, we need to do more stuff about Black history,” and I could sense people looking at me. I’d desperately wanted someone to lock eyes with and be like, “This is weird, isn’t it?”
Did your work as a teacher give you a fund of material for fiction?
Making Kwame a teacher felt a slight risk because I worried I wouldn’t know how to use my knowledge in a way that wasn’t just me writing polemic: “I’ve been teaching for over a decade at three different places, let me tell you what I know…” I could write another two whole novels about that! I was keen to show the ordinariness of the exchanges between Kwame and his students. In the political conversation about education, there’s little attention paid to the real human work – what it costs for a person to wake up at 6am and finish at 8pm after marking and to have more than 100 conversations every single day.
What led you to the book’s matter-of-fact candour about gay sex?
Sometimes in queer novels there’s a titillating quality; I wanted the sex to feel sexy but I didn’t want people rubbing their thighs. Did I sense my teacherly responsibilities or the attitudes I suppose my students might have reading a novel where Mr Donkor’s written about willies and cum and stuff? I don’t know how I managed this, but honestly, when I sit down to write, I forget everyone else: it’s just me, the characters and the 500 words I’ve set myself to tackle.
