Like many a London millennial, Will Hunter’s Twitter feed is a satisfying mix of pop culture and spiky political commentary. But as a junior doctor, Hunter has the added insight of life on an A&E ward. There’s a patient he finds ‘absolutely covered head to toe in [their] own faeces’. Another tweet reads, ‘I’ve been to see a patient who had his arm amputated and when I was doing something fiddly… out of habit I said, “This is the bit where I always need an extra hand”, and he just looked at me for ages and then went, “Yeah mate, I know the feeling.”’
‘Working in A&E, it’s sad and intense, but there’s also so much humour and absurdity,’ says Hunter. The 29-year-old doctor — and soon to be published author under Stormzy’s #Merky Books imprint — is speaking to me over Zoom from his hotel in San Cristobal, southern Mexico where he’s finishing up four months of travelling; and the final chapters of his debut novel, People Like Us. Slated as ‘a story of a boy who falls in love with a family and into a world in which he doesn’t belong’, Hunter’s novel beat a thousand entries with a narrative that explores a young mixed race man enamoured by west London upper middle class society, while wrestling with his own identity.
Storytelling has always played a vital role in Hunter’s life, and his own is fascinating. The son of two barristers who ‘met and fell in love at university’, Hunter grew up in a village just outside of Manchester which involved ‘a lot of running round fields and climbing on hay bales’. His dad was born in Jamaica and moved to the UK when he was eight, his mum grew up between Manchester and Salford. Hunter inherited their love of the outdoors, while discovering his own passions for writing (‘mostly terrible poetry’). When he decided to study medicine on the encouragement of Shrewsbury School, a ‘very white, very upper middle class’ boarding school, ‘writing became something that was just for me’.
His experiences as a junior registrar in A&E encompass some truly life-affirming moments. ‘It’s a privilege to work in the NHS and connect with people on a very human level,’ he explains. There have been lows too. He was on the frontline during the pandemic. ‘The second wave was the hardest because hospitals were incredibly busy and the vaccine rollout hadn’t started properly. It felt inescapable. You could see in the consultants’ eyes, people right at the top of the chain were scared. I was going through some personal stuff and it all came crashing down on me. I ended up having to take a month off work from anxiety.
‘As an institution, we went from Covid, to it being really busy in A&E and this sort of collapsing that we’re seeing at the moment. That’s where a lot of the anger is coming from with the nurses, paramedics and doctors strikes. Yes, it was born out of the frustration of stagnant and falling wages over the past 20 years, but it’s also this pent-up emotion from having battled through something so intense, and feeling like there’s been very little recognition from the power structures.’
It was during the first lockdown, from his flat in Bow, that Hunter started work on People Like Us. He’d previously lived in Tooting, which features heavily in the novel, as do Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, ‘a vivid backdrop that reflects the complex melting pot of race, class and money’. Despite working ‘50, sometimes 60’ hours a week, Hunter wrote the bulk of the book in snatched moments between shifts. He’d been sitting on the idea for a while, informed by recurring experiences he’d had in romantic relationships.
‘I fall in love easily — or I think I fall in love easily — and I noticed that I’d switch to fit what I thought that person might want.’ Has the realisation changed his approach to dating now? ‘I’m still figuring it out,’ he grins. ‘When you are losing yourself in a relationship, you often feel good because you’re pleasing someone else. Instead, I try to look out for the moments where I feel validated, but I’m not getting my self worth from another person.’
My own racial identity was being explained to me by white people
Hunter came out halfway through medical school, aged 21. ‘I realised the same theme had been in my life for a long time. I had a tricky relationship with school. I loved my time there — it was like having 700 brothers around all the time — but as a queer person, especially when I was in the closet, I was performing a version of myself. Then as a person of colour, the things I was hearing about myself were mainly from white people, so I had a strange experience of my own racial identity being explained to me. It wasn’t until I went to university that I developed a relationship with my blackness that wasn’t through a prism of whiteness. It’s been nice to feel out my identity in that way.’
Hunter’s protagonist also finds himself in a very white world. ‘Feeling like nobody knows you or understands you is a difficult brain space to be in. I realised after I came out that there had been two versions of me: the one that I knew deep down was real, and the one I was projecting to the world. The more you relax into your identity, the more you can actually allow people in.’
He hopes readers will connect with People Like Us in the way he’s related to stories by Zadie Smith, Candice Carty Williams and Caleb Azumah Nelson. ‘Ever since I could pick up a book I’ve been devouring stories, but I hadn’t realised until I started reading those authors that there’s a level of disconnect when the canon you’re reading is all by and about white people. When you find a Black story, or a queer story, and connect with it on this deep level, it’s such a powerful thing.’
I realised after I came out that there had been two versions of me
Publishing is notoriously pale and stale — and frustratingly slow to evolve. A startling 2020 New York Times survey analysing widely read English-language fiction books between 1950 and 2018 found that 95 per cent were written by white authors. #Merky Books launched in 2018 with the urgent ambition of levelling the playing field. It’s published critically acclaimed debuts from writers like Jyoti Patel (2021’s prize winner) while Stormzy, Olympic boxer Ramla Ali and former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman have all released their memoirs on the imprint. ‘I’m so grateful it exists and there’s a wider conversation within publishing now,’ says Hunter. ‘These stories are so important and historically they haven’t been told because they’ve not been marketable or because the industry has been so white.
After entering the New Writers’ Prize in August, he was shortlisted and invited to a writers’ camp with workshops and talks. Meeting authors, editors and agents was invaluable in demystifying the opaque world of publishing. Hunter now has ambitions to write more novels as well as non-fiction, but will continue working as a doctor, too. ‘I love it. I couldn’t give it up because there’s just too much life to experience in it.’
