{"id":3659,"date":"2024-11-04T13:12:15","date_gmt":"2024-11-04T13:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.worldprivilegeplus.com\/?p=3659"},"modified":"2025-01-23T10:56:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T10:56:13","slug":"meet-the-extremely-talented-winner-of-stormzys-merky-books-2023-william-rafet-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/meet-the-extremely-talented-winner-of-stormzys-merky-books-2023-william-rafet-hunter\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the \u2018extremely talented\u2019 winner of Stormzy\u2019s #Merky Books 2023 William Rafet Hunter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When asked about the New Writers\u2019 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 \u201c\u2026she was like, you have to send this in! Like, this is really good. And I think if she hadn\u2019t said that, I probably wouldn\u2019t have done it, so I owe her a lot\u201d. The doctor was \u201ccompletely blown away\u201d and said, \u201cI still have moments where it has not really settled in\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discussing his debut novel \u2018People Like Us\u2019, now to be called \u2018Sunstruck\u2019 , Will revealed \u201c\u2026it was about the characters and just how kind of vibrant they felt\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\u201c\u2026I 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\u2019s 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\u2019s strong enough to overcome those very structural things because love feels so organic in some ways, but then, now there\u2019s all of this structure around it\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. \u201cThere 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\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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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: \u201cI\u2019ve seen how the previous winners’ books have done and their writing really speaks for itself and I hope mine does as well\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Exploring the writer\u2019s other successes, studying Medicine and earning a Master\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He vocalises the ups and downs of working in Accident and Emergency starting in December 2019. \u201cYou 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\u201d. On the other hand, Will explains how rewarding it was \u201c\u2026seeing 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\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Although Will has taken a step back from A&E and is focusing more on writing, he refers to feeling \u201creally 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\u2026 I could understand them (patients) better. I could be kinder. I understood feeling scared, and I understood feeling ashamed\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst conversing about the lack of representation for strong queer and\/or black leads in media, books, public figures, etc., Will shares that a \u201cbig inspiration of mine is a writer called Caleb Azuma Nelson\u2026I really loved Queenie by Candice Carty Williams. I think it\u2019s like an excellent book\u201d and also talks about how he \u201cgrew up reading a lot of Zadie Smith\u201d. They discuss how they feel lucky to be a part of #MerkyBooks as they\u2019re now included in this new wave of black British writers that the industry is starting to notice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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What else can you expect from Will Hunter? He shares, ” Currently, I\u2019m 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\u2026 I\u2019d love to just feel out the edges of my writing practice, I guess, and see where I can go with it. I\u2019m interested in doing some more essay writing and just writing about the world around me, because it\u2019s something that I\u2019ve always wanted to do. And since winning the prize, I\u2019ve now got the opportunity and the confidence in my own voice where I\u2019m like, okay, I can. I can take this seriously. I can. I can be a writer. That\u2019s something that I can do\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here at Elevate, we are beyond excited to read \u2018Sunstruck\u2019 due to be released on 15th May 2025. Available to pre-order from Amazon<\/a>, Blackwells, Bookshop.org, Foyles, Hive, Waterstones,  Penguin Books and WHSmith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3659"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3698,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions\/3698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldprivilegeplus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}