Writer Diran Adebayo tells Ruth Gorb he will be questioning the rules of literature at next month’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival

TAKE the title, Writer in Residence. If you think about it at all, you think academic, fusty, ivory tower. And here comes Diran Adebayo, young, black and streetwise, newly appointed writer in residence at the British Museum.
His aim? To shake up the young, especially young men, who think that books aren’t cool.
In the week when he takes up his post, he will be speaking in this year’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival as part of their Literature in the Afternoon series.
Yes, says Piers Plowright, who set up the programme, he is aware that it sounds slightly naughty, but that’s good. He is a bit of a mover and shaker himself – witness his choice of speakers which goes from young Adebayo to 72-year-old first-time novelist Charles Chadwick, not to mention poet Ruth Padel who is not only the great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and the first ever woman fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, but has spent the last few years researching tigers in 10 Asian countries.
There can be few people more qualified than Piers Plowright to take part in this increasingly impressive festival. The power houses behind the event approached him as the ideal man to integrate literature into their music programme. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (“The only fellow who has never written anything,” he says). For 30 years he was a BBC radio producer – his programme, Mr Bee, about the schoolteacher at St Anthony’s School in Hampstead who refused to retire and went on teaching for no salary, is a classic example of his witty and elegant work.
He was born in Hampstead, the son of a GP, and has lived here all his life, most recently in Well Walk. He is also a champion of the right to swim in the Hampstead Heath Ponds.
It was fitting, therefore, that he should discuss the programme with one of his guests, Charles Chadwick (who is a neighbour, in Denning Road) at Louis’s Patisserie in Heath Street. His brief for the festival was to find new works of literature, and Chadwick’s novel, arriving very recently with a fanfare of trumpets, fitted the bill perfectly – even if it had been 30 years in the writing.
Adebayo’s output in a lifetime not much longer than that has been impressive. Born in the Whittington Hospital to Nigerian parents in 1968, he read law at Oxford but always wanted to be a writer.
His first novel, Some Kind of Black, was published in 1996, and won the New Writer of the Year Award, the Betty Trask Award and the Authors Club Award. He followed up with another novel, My Once Upon a Time, and has another in progress. Writing for the next few months has to be fitted around an action-packed programme at the British Museum.
“I want to make books funkier,” he says, “and I want to raise the profile of the museum. You get lots of tourists there, but not many local people. It’s such a beautiful place. And the reading room has always been a haven for exiles – Karl Marx used to work there – and I want to extend that friendship to more recent arrivals, to Kurds and Somalis, all those recently exiled.”
How will he do it? He is arranging performances and readings, story-telling that will bring to life the myths around the statues in the museum, and he’ll have musicians using the museum’s old African instruments. He’ll carry on the good work as guest director of this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival when he will celebrate African writing.
Is there such a thing as black writing in this country, or does that put it into a ghetto? A deep breath as he launches into something evidently close to his heart. He says: “Literature is literature? There is a lie around universality. Take Shakespeare: he didn’t become great automatically; 100 years after he died and his status was in question. All writing is subject to politics and power. It is a myth that good work rises to the top – we’ve all got too many projections for that.
“Take Mandela. All white people love him. Where were they in the 1960s and 1970s? They called him a terrorist. We black people love him less now. His status has been sinking in South Africa because the people say ‘we are poorer now’. There is always a different perspective on things. We should look more closely at why something is liked.
“I am a writer. I spend a lot of time thinking about things that all writers think about – the sun, nature. But I am also a black writer. Black is how the world treats me, and how I understand the world.”

FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

Saturday, May 14
• Diran Adebayo will be talking about his work, and about the current British literary scene, at Keats House in Keats Grove, Hampstead.
Monday, May 16
• The much-loved and celebrated novelist Beryl Bainbridge will talk on Monday, May 16, at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute about the use of history in her novels. The Crimean War, Scott of the Antarctic and Dr Johnson have been the starting point for some of her most fascinating work.
Tuesday, May 17
• Charles Chadwick will talk about his launch onto the literary scene, and about his growing realisation that being true to himself produced his late flowering. At Keats House.
Wednesday, May 18
• Distinguished biographer and novelist Miranda Seymour looks at the differences in tackling the two forms – and will talk about her wonderful biography of the raffish woman racing driver, The Bugatti Queen, just out in paperback.
Thursday, May 19
• Actress Gayle Hunnicutt will give a romantic story from the past when she talks about the love letters her father wrote to her mother when he was a cavalry officer during the war. She has edited the letters, and called the book Dearest Virginia. The evening takes place at Lauderdale House in Highgate.
Saturday, May 21
• Poet Ruth Padel finishes the series at Keats House with a talk she calls Jungle and Tangle, Tigers and Other Animals.

For ticket prices and times of Literature in the Afternoons events, ring the box office on 0870 033 2733.