Every month Brave Island runs a Young Creative of the Month fund, where we spotlight a local young creative with an interview on our blog, and support them with funding of £100. For December, it’s author Kit Kanthan. This fund launches at the beginning of every month, you can apply to be Young Creative of the Month for January here.
Please can you tell us about your creative practice?
Hello! I’m a writer and avid daydreamer and I have been for as long as I can remember. I put all my wildest concepts into words for the enjoyment of others (and myself too!). As a proudly disabled + queer writer, I hope to showcase my work to a wide audience as well as prove that you can achieve your dreams no matter what.
What does your writing process look like?
The process of writing is certainly not the easiest. It is incredibly time-consuming and requires a lot of effort to create all the intricacies of the plot, sub-plots, narrative, etc. It requires pre-planning and post-planning too, between managing costs, finding agents/publishers, promotion, and the like. It has been said that writing the book itself is only a third of what goes into becoming an author!
When writing Of Thunder and Flames, I found it easy to sink into the universe, whether that be trekking the landscapes of Northor or discovering the dark secrets of the Lublaoca Dynasty. I often find it somewhat of a comfort to dive deep into my creation and leave reality for a while.
How do you hope to use these skills in the future?
I wouldn’t say there are any specific writers out there that inspired me. As a child, you could usually find me deep in a book or waddling around Waterstones, taking in many styles and genres of books from a very young age. When I turned five, I already had a reading age of eleven — I had already read the likes of Stig of the Dump and Animal Farm. I had a large interest in the Warrior Cats series of books as a teen, and this had me branching out into all sorts of other fantasy tales.
Where can people find your work if they’d like to support you
If you’d like to check out my work, visit my site kitkanthan.com (updated biweekly) or my Twitter, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook via @KitKanthan. The latter two are pretty inactive right now, but next year all four will be up and running.
