Meet the ‘extremely talented’ winner of Stormzy’s #Merky Books 2023 William Rafet Hunter
Interviewed by Ruby Bradshaw
Driven by personal experiences 30-year-old William Hunter (he/they) aims to bridge societal gaps through universal themes of human connection. Winning the #MerkyBooks New Writers’ Prize 2022 alongside being a junior doctor working in Accident and Emergency, he draws on his identity to enhance patient care, viewing empathy as a strength in healthcare settings where kindness and responsibility are paramount and this heavily influences his writing.
When asked about the New Writers’ Prize, he tells me he first heard about it on the radio and when confiding in a friend about their entry a few days before the deadline “…she was like, you have to send this in! Like, this is really good. And I think if she hadn’t said that, I probably wouldn’t have done it, so I owe her a lot”. The doctor was “completely blown away” and said, “I still have moments where it has not really settled in”.
Discussing his debut novel ‘People Like Us’, now to be called ‘Sunstruck’ , Will revealed “…it was about the characters and just how kind of vibrant they felt” that made his entry stand out against almost 1,000 other entries submitted. He goes on to tell me more about the book; following two young men in the South of France who meet and fall in love whilst on holiday and how that bond is tested when they return back home in London. One of the men is mixed race, working-class, whereas the other is white and from a well off London based family.
“…I draw a lot from some of my experiences of dating, but also just of like, being a person of colour in quite white spaces, which is something that I think most people of color in the UK experience to some degree, and trying to find the point of human connection in those, like, quite fraught spaces. I guess it’s come from a thought experiment, on how to bridge those gaps and love across things like race and class. And it's just about how, whether or not it’s strong enough to overcome those very structural things because love feels so organic in some ways, but then, now there’s all of this structure around it”
Hunter mentions there will be points of reference to black culture - specifically Jamaican culture and hopes these points will hit home with readers who can relate. “There are also some really universal points about how you love and how you feel loved by someone who is different to you, that will appeal too”.
I asked whether or not Will feels any pressure regarding being a prize winner to which he responded by commending other successful candidates of the #MerkyBooks Prize: “I’ve seen how the previous winners' books have done and their writing really speaks for itself and I hope mine does as well”.
Exploring the writer’s other successes, studying Medicine and earning a Master’s in Clinical and Forensic Psychology at Newcastle University, he describes how he thrives on having a busy schedule and therefore enjoys incorporating all socializing, writing and studying into his life.
He vocalises the ups and downs of working in Accident and Emergency starting in December 2019. “You are taking on a lot of emotion, and I find it quite hard to separate myself from the patients' emotions. So I find it a very emotionally taxing job”. On the other hand, Will explains how rewarding it was “…seeing the change in someone from them being anxious and afraid when they come in and being more reassured and feeling safer when they leave.. I found that amazing”.
Although Will has taken a step back from A&E and is focusing more on writing, he refers to feeling “really lucky to be a queer black person. I think those parts of my identity allow me a level of empathy with other people who are struggling in so many different ways… I could understand them (patients) better. I could be kinder. I understood feeling scared, and I understood feeling ashamed”.
Whilst conversing about the lack of representation for strong queer and/or black leads in media, books, public figures, etc., Will shares that a “big inspiration of mine is a writer called Caleb Azuma Nelson…I really loved Queenie by Candice Carty Williams. I think it’s like an excellent book” and also talks about how he “grew up reading a lot of Zadie Smith”. They discuss how they feel lucky to be a part of #MerkyBooks as they’re now included in this new wave of black British writers that the industry is starting to notice.
What else can you expect from Will Hunter? He shares, " Currently, I’m focusing more on my writing. Started, as I said, on my second novel. I would love for Sunstruck to potentially become something else, maybe get an adaptation or something like that… I’d love to just feel out the edges of my writing practice, I guess, and see where I can go with it. I’m interested in doing some more essay writing and just writing about the world around me, because it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. And since winning the prize, I’ve now got the opportunity and the confidence in my own voice where I’m like, okay, I can. I can take this seriously. I can. I can be a writer. That’s something that I can do”.
Here at Elevate, we are beyond excited to read ‘Sunstruck’ due to be released on 15th May 2025. Available to pre-order from Amazon, Blackwells, Bookshop.org, Foyles, Hive, Waterstones, Penguin Books and WHSmith.
