Whatev er happened to writers working-class ?

She grew up poor and mixed-race, so Kit de Waal didn’t hold out many hopes of becoming a successful writer. Now a literary sensation, the novelist is on a mission to tear down the barriers of privilege which keep working-class writers out of the cosy, mid

I’M new to this writing game. I was 51 when I went to university to do an MA in creative writing. At sixteen I got a job as a typist, then a filing clerk, an office manager, a paralegal in criminal and family law, a project manager in social services, a massage therapist, waitress and backing singer, became a member of the Employment Tribunal, the Adoption Panel and then a magistrate. I had a busy life. So, when I eventually started writing, I felt I had something to say.

Not only that, I’d paid my dues, eaten my way through the classics and a bit of contemporary literature, read too many books by old white men and loved them, avoided non-fiction and politics, dabbled in biography but only actors and nobodies, knew a bit of Shakespeare and swathes of Dickens, stumbled across the Channel and discovered Zola, Flaubert, Mauriac and Maupassant then headed in the other direction to Henry James, Mark Twain, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, quite a journey for a child that grew up in a house without books.

At home, we had a narrow choice of reading matter: the News of The World my Caribbean father bought every Sunday or a daily dose of The Bible from my Irish mother. The Sunday paper had racy bits of scandal but was overstuffed with sport, and The Bible was pushed at us so often that by the time I was 15 I had read it cover to cover twice. And anyway, reading was what you did at school, why bring it home?

That is not to say that I didn’t love the stories that we read in rote around the classroom but I never thought of reading as a voluntary pastime. In my careers essay I said I wanted to be a journalist but working-class girls with immigrant parents girls didn’t go to university, they became secretaries and nurses so I cheerfully left school at the first opportunity and read nothing until my mid-twenties. Then through books I discovered the world.

The advice you’re given when you start is “write what you know”. What did I know? I knew about criminal lives, about women who lose their children, about foster care and angry kids, being broke, drugs, how to do a handbrake turn, burglaries, solicitors, barristers, social workers, bad flats, stale food, no food, cold, desperation, loving and laughing, survival and living.

This wasn’t suitable material for a book, at least not any of the books I’d read so I looked again at the writers I loved because surely that’s the place to go for inspiration. I found was that it wasn’t the prose style of writers like Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett and Patrick Hamilton that had me hooked all these years but it was the content of their stories, tales about the ordinary, about the woman at the edge of things, the man in the bedsit, the quiet domestic lives with huge micro-dramas, stories about ill-fitters or non-fitters, people like me, off-centre.

But when I looked closer still, I found that many of these writers were peering in on those lives from a place of relative privilege and ease. Arnold Bennett, a solicitor; Somerset Maugham, a doctor; Patrick Hamilton, Graham Green, Gustave Flaubert – all from the comfortable middle-classes. Even George Orwell went to Eton and I was the daughter of a bus driver and a childminder.

The truth is, and I heard this more than once, “literature is a record of the middle classes for the middle classes.” Certainly the definitions of literature and what constitutes good taste are tightly bound up with class. What the working-class or underclass produce is rarely included in the canon: street literature, songs, hymns, spoken word, dialect and oral storytelling is nowhere to be found, neither is it taught in schools or universities. After all, universal education has only been around for 100 years. How many working-class writers would have been able to write a book even given the luxury of time, space and an audience?

The term working class has never had more problems. According to a major BBC survey using economic, social and cultural indicators there are now seven social classes, ranging from the elite at the top to a “precariat” – the poor, precarious proletariat – at the bottom. The closer you get to the bottom, the