Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Peter Kalu, "One Drop"

 

Pete Kalu writes crime fiction, scifi and YA novels. He also pens short stories in styles ranging from realist to surreal to the carnivalesque. Until recently, he ran a carnival band called Moko Jumbies. More on his website here and on Twitter @peterkalu and Instagram @petekalu.

About One Drop, by Peter Kalu

One Drop is  Malcolm X meets George Orwell: a dystopian novel that looks through eyes of two black teenagers – Axel and Dune – at what might happen if demagogues gained power and used technology to crush resistance. In war-torn Britain, inseparable Black Radicals Axel and Dune are arrested. With SIMs implanted in their heads, they are placed in a prison camp for those who defy the Bloods’ white supremacist government. The SIMs start brainwashing them with the Bloods’ evil philosophy, and drones constantly monitor their movements and thoughts. 

In this living nightmare, the couple battle to keep their love alive and to break free. The odds on survival are long. Dune and Axel have very different takes on how to escape. But when things come to a head, will their love hold them together and set them free, or will it tear them apart?

Below, you can read a short sample from One Drop.

 

From One Drop

The London Wind

The London wind had got up and was blowing bomb smoke from the south, from far beyond the fences that held us in. The smoke was a wall, maybe half a mile high and wide enough to blow across the entire prison camp, which it did. Soon we were choking in it. I wanted to duck down but Dune said ‘No, let’s stay out.’ 

So we gauzed up our mouths and noses and sat there, squinting, letting it blow over us. It surged on, tugging in its wake everything that had been trapped within it, and lifting up new stuff. Cinder from the cooking fires, rust from burned-out cars, bits of plastic, rags, a fugitive wanted poster. The smoke storm hurtled along, carrying alarmed cries from the tent zone and the screeches of birds that were pulling away before the rolling wall of smoke. 

We held onto each other, me and Dune. It blew over fast. No longer than twenty seconds. When I slipped off my gauze, I saw Dune was twitching, the pupils of their eyes flexing, and their limbs stiffening.

 They nudged me. - I think I’m fading, the drones are gumming me again.

- You’re not. You’re right here. 

- No, I can feel it, Axel. They’re at  me. They always coming for me.

- C’mon, Dune. We lickle but we strong, right?

- Don’t joke. I know they’re gumming me. Remember me, Ax. If I’m totally gummed. 

- OK.

- Remember me, Ax.

It was one effect of the gumming. The repetition.

- You’re OK. It’s passed.

I could see it had passed. Dune was OK. Shaken but OK. 

- Am I?

- Watch.

I put Dune in a headlock the way they loved, and they laughed and pretended to struggle, squirming and bucking and laughing into my halter top all at the same time.

I didn’t know it then but soon Dune would be gone and that would be the last time I headlocked them. Right now, their legs were kicking, their hips jerking, their lips rubbing the cotton straps at my collar bone, their Afro tickling my chin. 

- No way can you wriggle free, I got moves on moves!

 gif by Akinyemi Oludele, inspired by the book