I'm a writer and broadcaster. 'Maggie & Me' is my memoir and 'You Will Be Safe Here' is my first novel. Both are being adapted for stage and tv now! And I'm hard at work on my second novel, a big gay Scottish love story for Canongate Books. 'You Will Be Safe Here' is set in South Africa in 1901 and now. It explores legacies of abuse, redemption and the strength of the human spirit - there is always, light even in our very darkest moments. I didn't imagine it would feel so urgent when it was published. 'South Africa, 1901, the height of the second Boer War. Sarah van der Watt and her son are taken from their farm by force to Bloemfontein Concentration Camp where, the English promise: they will be safe. Johannesburg, 2010. Sixteen-year-old outsider Willem just wants to be left alone with his books and his dog. Worried he's not turning out right, his ma and her boyfriend send him to New Dawn Safari Training Camp. Here they 'make men out of boys'. Guaranteed.' Inspired by real events, it uncovers a hidden colonial history and present-day darkness while exploring our capacity for cruelty and kindness. Here's what some writers I admire are saying: 'This would be an achievement for a third or fourth novel; for a first, it's an astonishing one. Barr's handling of his bravely chosen material - the conjoined shames of British and Afrikaaner history - is deft and the results will haunt you.' Patrick Gale. 'Devastating and formally ingenious, it traces the paths by which historical grief engenders present violence . A vitally brave and luminously compassionate book.' Garth Greenwell. 'Damian Barr has written a novel concerned with single strain of human history, of how a people are made and unmade and how they go on to make and unmake others, of the stories they tell themselves to allow such things to pass....You Will Be Safe Here is as unexpected as it is unsettling, both in the telling and in the way that telling works to reveal hidden trails through the points of light and darkness.' Aminatta Forna 'Maggie & Me' is my memoir of surviving small-town Scotland in the Thatcher years. It won Sunday Times Memoir of the Year: "Full to the brim with poignancy, humour, brutality and energetic and sometimes shimmering prose, the book confounds one's assumptions about those years and drenches the whole era in an emotionally charged comic grandeur. It is hugely affecting." BBC Radio 4 made it a Book of the Week. Stonewall named me Writer of the Year 2013. I've also co-written two plays for Radio 4 and written a short after play for their Fact to Fiction slot. From 2008-2023, I ran my own Literary Salon - interviewing fellow writers, profiling indie bookshops and share all kinds of bookish content. Guests included: Jojo Moyes, John Waters, Mary Beard, Yaa Gyasi, David Nicholls, Colm Tóibín, Taiye Selasi, David Mitchell and Rose McGowan. www.theliterarysalon.co.uk My life is books - writing them, talking about them on tv and radio and interviewing other writers about their literary loves. I present my own books tv show on BBC - check out The Big Scottish Book Club on BBC iPlayer. You can follow me on twitter @damian_barr and insta @mrdamianbarr. I live by the sea in Brighton with my husband.