During the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, books written by black authors were suddenly on everyone’s wishlists and timelines. They climbed to the top of the bestsellers charts and were picked up by avid anti-racists and clueless Instagram influencers alike. They were also left on the shelves by those who ordered them in a blinding flash of white guilt and didn’t bother to read them. Google “black authors 2020” and you’ll get dozens of reading lists. On many, you’ll see Brit Bennett’s novel, The Vanishing Half, published in June. And on others, you’ll find the work of Jackie Kay, the Scots Makar (Scotland’s poet laureate).

Bennett’s second novel, which I read in the throes of a lonely summer, did not resonate for me just because it focuses on the complexities of race; nor did Jackie Kay’s book Strawgirl, published in 2002, become one of my favourite childhood books purely because it featured a Nigerian-Scottish protagonist whose racial identity I could relate to. Instead, both these books resonated because their authors are warm storytellers with a rich interest in how and why people move through the world. These are writers full of ideas and heart, who will make you care as deeply about their characters as they do, whether a grizzled man injured up a Scottish mountain, or a scared American housewife baking a lopsided cake.

A book about twins, one of whom decides to “pass” as white, The Vanishing Half became one of the year’s bestsellers. Kay, meanwhile, has been prolific in many forms - winning the Guardian fiction prize for her novel Trumpet in 1998, publishing a book of short stories, Wish I Was Here, and a blistering memoir Red Dust Road, also adapted for stage.

While they grew up on different sides of the Atlantic (Bennett in southern California, and Kay in the Highlands), they share much when it comes to the themes of their work, their reverence for black American novelist Toni Morrison, and their fascination with the passing of time, if not in their demeanours. In conversation, over a sometimes choppy video call, Kay is a bright spark – flitting between tales before landing with precision back on the branch of her thought process. Bennett, meanwhile, has a comforting knack of getting at the emotions you hadn’t quite been able to articulate.

JK When the pandemic started, I began thinking about the fact that my carriage will turn into a pumpkin next March. I’m the Makar, the national poet laureate of Scotland, and it’s only a five-year period, so I still really wanted to actively be Makar and continue to give. But as the thing has gone on, I found the whole business of how you respond to it as a public figure very different.

You live the pandemic through the people who are the most vulnerable in your life, and that makes you extremely tentative, in a way. My mum was in a care home at the beginning of lockdown and then I broke her out, but at the moment she’s in hospital. Nothing is certain, and you question whether there is anything you can write about that at all. I don’t know about you, Brit?

BB I moved to New York at the end of 2019, so had been living here for a few months before it became the global epicentre. It’s been very surreal. I remember, when lockdown began, the experience of hearing sirens all day and all night, and how terrifying that was, but also how fortunate I felt to be a writer. I’ve been able to keep writing.

But I was curious, Jackie, about the work you’ve done. I have not been able to write about this pandemic. I have been writing other things; imagining worlds that are so different to what we’re currently experiencing. I feel there is no part of me that will want to revisit what this was like. Have you been able to write about this moment?

JK I haven’t written very much. I wrote one poem on Mother’s Day, which was to my mum while she was in the care home. She was looking out of the window saying, “It’s so still, still, still.” It fascinated me that she was able to get the change of atmosphere of the world from that window. I think poetry is perhaps easier to use to respond to particular things, because you can span time in a different way than in fictional prose.

Your work deals so vividly and brilliantly with spanning time, moving back and forth across it. In fact, in The Vanishing Half you take a whole sweep of history in your stride with extraordinary detail and precision; from Martin Luther King’s assassination year to the Aids pandemic. Every time you get to a new chapter, you have an extraordinary technique where you begin at the middle of a moment and then you move backward and forward from that moment, as if your eye has panoramic vision.

BB Thank you. I am very obsessed with time, as a writer. I think that’s the single thing that I think about the most, because it’s one of the biggest choices you can make in writing a novel. I’ve recently divorced myself from the notion that I’m interested in chronological time, or the linear narrative. It’s not how we experience time. There is a linearity to this pandemic, I suppose, but that’s not how it feels, emotionally, to experience it. It feels like some other type of shape.

The fear of wasting time is something I’ve had to confront. I’ve thought deeply about this collective loss that we’re all experiencing. We’re all unmoored from time. It’s a very strange moment.

The conversation moves on to representation in literature.

JK I grew up in Scotland and was adopted by white parents, so I found reflections of my own experience in literature. I used to obsessively read African American writers in my teens because I didn’t really have any black British writers to turn to. In the late 1970s, I remember coming across Toni Morrison and reading The Bluest Eye and Sula.

I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of “passing” [when a person of one racial group crosses into another undetected]. I’ve read Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, William Faulkner’s Light In August, and noted it in the great American obsession with “quadroons” and “octoroons”. The idea of passing is not even that you appear to be something that you’re not to everyone else, but that you convince yourself. Stella, in your book, changes the way she talks; she says the word “lovely”, she has all these expressions that she wouldn’t have used [had she not passed]. I was wondering what made you fascinated by that process?

BB For me, the entry point was [Douglas Sirk’s] Imitation Of Life. That was a movie my mum showed me...

JK That’s one of my favourite movies: I’ve seen it over and over again!

BB Yeah, an iconic movie. [Based on the 1934 novel, the film tells the story of a film star who takes in a woman and her biracial daughter, who wants to be seen as white.] When I watched it, I had never heard of passing and didn’t really conceive that it was something that you could do, that you would want to do. I’ve never been mistaken for something that I do not identify as, so the question of “Would you pass?” was never one I’d considered.

I wanted to think about those stories from my point of view as a writer in the 21st century, and question what it means to pass if we assume that identity is fluid. A lot of these older passing stories felt like they were strengthening racial categories. The “passing” character has to die, or something bad happens to them. There is something that always made me uncomfortable about that. It suggests that there’s something essential about race, when there isn’t; and that these categories and the way they’re doled out are fixed, when that’s also not true.

I think about my own family: my mother grew up in Louisiana. She has one sister who has pale skin and red hair, while my mum is a couple of shades lighter than me. They have the same mother and father, who are both black. I wanted to think about the ways in which some of these categories are very real because they affect our lives in tangible ways. Sometimes there’s this line of thinking that deeply irritates me, that race is a fiction. Yes, that’s true, but then racism doesn’t exist? No, that’s false. The categories are fictional but the implications of them are life or death.

JK It seems to me that you are really interested in the invented self, and what possibilities there are to experience and to live your life as another. Your character, Jude, who gets to experience the least freedom as a child, gets to experience the most as a young woman, especially in her love. And her love, Reese [a trans man], gives that sense of transformative identity; where you realise that gender and sex are fluid things, and that we always, as a society, want to make things static: male, female, black, white, and all the rest of it.

The truly liberating thing is when people can actually experience that fluidity in the way that, say, you might experience music. That’s what I was really interested in writing about in my first novel, Trumpet. I created this character called Joss Moody, a black, Scottish jazz musician [and a trans man]. Through music, the way it has shifted, how fluid it is – from the blues to jazz – I could then look at how our possible selves are constructed. People are suspicious of changes in names, language, how you describe yourself, what you might wear to express yourself. And yet all we’ve ever actually known as people is change.

BB I’m glad you brought up Trumpet, because I read that while I was in college. I loved it. I wondered if you could talk a little more about creating that character, and also just writing about music – what it means to write about a form of art that the reader is not directly experiencing.

JK When I write about music, I’m interested in its time, its politics, what else was happening around it. I’ve got a new-old book coming out in February – a reprint of a book I wrote 20 years ago. If you sit around long enough, your old books come back! I wrote it at the same time as Trumpet. I stopped writing Trumpet because I got stuck, and I went away and wrote a book about the American blues singer Bessie Smith. I just listened to the blues over and over, and something about going into her life allowed me to come back to Joss Moody.

BB I recently saw the Bessie Smith film with Queen Latifah, then read a biography of her, so she has been a little bit on my mind. I’ve been reading a lot of books about black women singers and thinking about the representation or lack thereof of black female genius, so I’m really excited to read your book.

JK Thanks! When I was reading The Vanishing Half I kept trying to decide what your specialism was. You write about maths, art, medicine, acting. It made me really want to know, do you love maths? Did you have any experience of art, medicine, acting, or was it just exciting for you to create all that?

BB It is exciting to create it. A lot of these are areas of interest, so I love hearing actors talk about acting and the strangeness of it and the feeling of becoming something else. I love people who have interesting jobs, and people who know how to do very specialised things. A character at the beginning of the novel is a fingerprint examiner, and that’s work that my mother did. When I started on this book I thought, “Oh, fingerprints, identity.” It kind of fell into my lap.

JK I’m really interested in medicine and that has influenced me a lot. I remember meeting a gay Edinburgh pathologist who told me he carried around jars of diseased livers; livers that had suffered the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. He used these livers as a chat-up line. That man had had more lovers than livers!

I’m really interested in what people turn away from. I’m interested in musical art, in sexuality. I’m interested in being a kind of ventriloquist, in trying out lots of different voices and accents. I was fascinated when I went to Nigeria and found my birth father. His very emphases, syntax and turn of phrase were so different from my Glaswegian adoptive father. My birth father said, “If people were to know about you, they would lose their faith in God.” And it was a shocking sentence, but it was kind of particularly phrased. And another sentence he said was, “God in his wisdom has provided somebody for my sex drive.” [Laughs.]

I read somewhere that you said that it was difficult writing a second novel. I still haven’t written one: I wrote Trumpet over 20 years ago. It’s kind of haunted me and become the bane of my life. It makes me feel like a failure. Sometimes I wish I’d never even written a first one, because then I wouldn’t be expected to write a second. I naturally feel like a poet or a short story writer. I wondered how you coped with this second novel business?

BB You certainly should not feel like a failure. I admire that you are able to write in all of those forms, because I cannot. I went into it thinking that the second novel would come easier than the first, because I had already written one, and that was deeply uncomfortable; telling yourself, “You know how to do this, you’ve done it before.” At one point my best friend said, “You’ve never written a second novel before, OK? This is a thing that’s new.” Once I started to realise that was true, and gave myself permission to do something I’ve never done before, I had much more realistic expectations. So much of it was just psychologically trying to leave what you’ve done before behind.

The conversation turns to the influence of Black Lives Matter on publishing and reading lists.

BB When my book came out it was linked to the killing of George Floyd and called “timely”. But in reality the book, as we spoke about before, is set in so many different times, and there have been black people dying in this way in almost the whole history of the United States. So there was no point in which I was writing the book when its themes wouldn’t have been relevant – it was only called timely because in June, a wider, mostly white audience was suddenly eager to read about race. That shift had nothing to do with me or the contents of the book. So I was glad a larger audience turned to this book than might have otherwise, but at the same time, it’s frustrating that it took us all watching a black man’s killing for black authors and black books to receive the attention they gained this year.

JK We were here before, we’ll be here after, we’ll be here during. I feel a bit impatient with people who think they get to decide when they’re going to notice me. So I’ve been quite resistant. I’ve been asked to do a huge number of things, and I’ve turned down about 90% of them. I dislike the idea that somebody just decided to shift their gaze around me and I have to suddenly be grateful for that. Your book deals with a huge span of time for it to be called “timely”.

We’ve been through all of these different killings in this country, in America and around the world, and it’s a mistake to over-focus on one, because it allows people off the hook too quickly. There’s a moment in The Vanishing Half when Stella’s neighbour says to her, “You know, I’m not interested in your guilt, you can take it someplace else.” Stella is going through something much more complicated than white guilt but you feel a terrible loss, and what a waste it is. Racism is just a terrible waste of everyone’s time.

BB Absolutely.

JK Brit, I did have one little final question about your mum: is she very proud?

BB Yeah, she is, she is. My parents, they really wanted me not to be a writer. But they were thrilled, and they’re excited to watch the reception of this book. When my first book came out in France, I brought my mum with me. She had never left the country, so that was one of my happiest moments – of my writing allowing me to do that.

JK That’s nice. It reminds me of when my son was really small he said, “Mummy, why are you always going to poetry?” He thought poetry was a place! It was a really lovely idea, that he was imagining this town called Poetry. It would be the opposite of a town like Mallard [the fictional small, conservative town where part of The Vanishing Half is set]. Well, a real pleasure to talk to you.

BB Yes! Thank you!