Paul Mendez & Derek Owusu: Thorny Intersections (2020 Event)

How do you get the upper hand on a world you don’t yet
understand? That’s the burning question at the heart of two
striking debuts that scrape away the coming-of-age clichés,
breathing through the aches and pains of growing up.


With echoes of early Baldwin, Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk, one of
the Observer’s top 10 debuts of 2020, mines the author’s
upbringing as a lapsed Jehovah's Witness and, later, sex worker,
to tell an intergenerational story of two men stalled at an
impossible intersection of sexuality, spirituality and race.


Derek Owusu’s ‘virtuosic debut’ That Reminds Me — the first novel
to be released on Stormzy’s new imprint #Merky Books — pieces
together the fragments of K’s short life, as memories of
addiction, racism and trauma threaten to flatline an already
faltering recovery.


In this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival, join Owusu
and Mendez as they interrogate the forces that seek to cast a
shadow over the blossoming of young Black men in the UK today
with former Lord Mayor of Sheffield Magid Magid
- and fall in love with two writers soon to be on the tip of
everyone’s tongue.