Derek Owusu

Derek Owusu is a novelist and poet from North London, of Ghanaian heritage. He found writing late, sneaking into English Literature lectures at the University of Manchester while studying exercise science. He later completed an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University London. He has written for the BBC, ITV, Granta and Tate Britain, and was a founding member of the Black Writers Guild in 2020.

His novels sit between prose and poetry, between fragment and sustained narrative. That Reminds Me, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, won the 2020 Desmond Elliott Prize and was the first novel published under Stormzy's Merky imprint. Losing the Plot (2022) traces his mother's journey from Ghana to Britain in a form that reviewers called difficult to classify. The Recovery House (2026) follows a young writer in a residential mental health facility, written in long, unpunctuated sentences that blur the boundary between illness and inspiration.

In 2023 he was named to Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list, and Losing the Plot was longlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Jhalak Prize that year.

A new reader might begin with That Reminds Me for its raw, fragmentary account of a young Black man making sense of a chaotic upbringing, or go straight to The Recovery House if the question of what art costs its maker is what pulls you in.