Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2020

This is the story of K. If you believe your life to be as fictitious as K’s, if you find yourself within the pages of this book, then you are holding the pen and not me.

Attachments are broken at birth. Shards slide apart. K: a child put into foster care, a boy brought back to the city, a man who must fight to make sense of his past. Is there hope to be found in a broken mind? Can the pieces of a life come together to reveal an image that’s steady? Episodic, fragmented, full of poetry’s coiled power, That Reminds Me is the story of one young man remembering. It’s an entreaty to a lost culture, and a fight for love, for family, and for the respite of fixed identity. And in its searing and delicate questionings—of belonging, addiction, sexuality, violence, mental health, and religion—That Reminds Me firmly places Derek Owusu amongst the brightest British writers of today.

Derek Owusu is a writer, poet, and podcaster from north London. He discovered his passion for literature at the age of twenty-three while studying exercise science at university. Unable to afford a change of degree, Derek began reading voraciously and sneaking into English Literature lectures at the University of Manchester. Derek edited and contributed to Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space.

That Reminds Me, his first novel, won the 2020 Desmond Elliott Prize, the most prestigious UK prize for debut novels.

Penguin, 2020, 144 pages.