Derek Owusu

Feb 7, 2024 | inkl.com | Derek Owusu

The now Oscar-nominated film, former journalist Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut and based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, takes satirical aim at the publishing industry’s obsession with reducing Black writers to offensive clichés to pander to white audiences – as one character bluntly summarises, “white publishers feeding Black trauma porn”.

Aug 14, 2023 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Derek Owusu

I re-read the email. Honestly, I was still baffled. I asked my agent: are you sure this is for me? Had they even read my second book? Who else is on there? Finally I asked if being selected as one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists will help me sell more books. Of course, she said. I was asking silly questions, apparently. I sat on the side of my bed and thought everything through. I often speak to myself out loud, but all I could say was ‘this is mad’, shaking my head.

Jun 27, 2023 | kirkusreviews.com | Derek Owusu |Pat Conroy |Barbara Kingsolver

by Derek Owusu ‧ Owusu reckons movingly with complex personal and familial dynamics. A young London man navigates depression in this hypnotic book. There’s a life packed inside the pages of this slim novel. One of Owusu’s most impressive achievements here is creating the space of a much larger life—both for the novel’s narrator, K, and for K’s family—through elliptical references.

Jun 22, 2023 | theoffingmag.com | Derek Owusu |Lara Longo |Paige Clark

CHANGEAnansi, the weight of the world can never fall on the sky, so this is why your father has no empathy for me. Does he sleep to my stories or are you weaving words without care? Creep to his bedside and wake him with these pleas, and I’ll wait for the raindrop that proves his sympathy. 1The distance behind us pulled itself into shapes in motion – something trying to be free and the night exposing something troublesome.

Jun 15, 2023 | startribune.com | Derek Owusu

Derek Owusu's somber debut, "That Reminds Me," is lightly autobiographical, like much of today's fiction. The novel's protagonist — known as K — is raised, as was Owusu, by white foster parents in the English countryside, but moves back to his biological family in London, where he was born, and explores his Ghanaian heritage.