Maame Blue: 'Relationships are fundamental to who we are, so they need to be written about'
BY Maya Fernandes
14th Aug 2025
Maame Blue is the author of two novels; Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask Award, and The Rest Of You, shortlisted for the 2025 Jhalak Prose Prize. Her short stories have appeared in four anthologies, including 2025’s Be Gay, Do Crime. She writes for multiple publications including The Bookseller, Writers Mosaic and Arts Hub Australia. Maame has also been a reader for multiple short story competitions including The Commonwealth Prize and The Brick Lane Short Story Prize, and in 2024 she judged the John Florio Translation Prize.
We're delighted to welcome Maame as the latest addition to our expert teaching team. She’s now available to provide one-to-one mentoring, submission reports and full manuscript reports through our editorial services. (Places are limited, so express your interest soon if you’d like to work with her.)
We spoke to Maame about her approach to crafting authentic relationships, her reading recommendations and what she loves most about working with budding writers.
Your books explore many kinds of relationships – romantic, familial and otherwise. What interests you about writing these kinds of emotional stories, and how do you make them feel so real?
I think who we are as people can always be traced back to our significant relationships. Whether with our caregivers or the people that were supposed to take care of us, whether with our community, with strangers, with lovers, with our leaders and of course with ourselves. I gravitate towards true to life relationships in books in the same way, because that's how I learn about people. As a writer, I find that shaping a story around relationships also helps me learn (and eventually teach my reader) much more about the characters I am creating. Relationships and how we reckon with them are fundamental to who we are as human beings, so they need to be written about.
In your second novel The Rest of You, you tell the story through multiple characters, places and timelines. What drew you to choose such an expansive structure, and how did you make sure that each character had a unique and believable voice?
The simple answer is that I went through many different drafts of the novel before I landed on the final product. The more complex answer is that I spent a lot of time with the characters. Initially it was only going to follow Whitney, the present day protagonist's story, but I realised I was trying to tell a story about gaps in our heritage, without actually bringing in any of that history. So during a trip to Ghana speaking to elders and people who had migrated, the other voices in the book emerged, ones with links to the past and each with their own motivations and intentions. Even though the writing came all at once, I had spent many months in the lead up to that trip, writing down everything I thought I knew about those characters, writing them into different scenes, experimenting with their voices and how they talked to each other. And then I stepped away from that, took a trip and the words finally formed. The characters began speaking to me, as they say.
You've written both novels and shorter fiction for anthologies. How does your creative process shift depending on the format you’re writing in?
I love reading short stories, I've probably read hundreds for work and for pleasure and I'm fascinated by the craft, though I've only dipped my toe into it. Usually for me, writing a short story is something that happens in one sitting – a sort of quick idea on the page that I run through from start to finish. Then I have to go back to it later to figure out what the actual story is about and fix it from a much more structural angle. Whereas with novels, it's more like I'm keeping the story company over a long period of time, tending to it, letting it unfold at its own pace, and I have to have a routine otherwise its threads tend to slip away from me. It's probably a couple of years all in, of thinking, writing, thinking, rewriting before I'm able to tackle it on a structural level. Both are enjoyable but novel writing takes A LOT of patience and just a hint of delusion to sustain the belief that when you're done someone might actually enjoy reading it!
Place is a vivid and often emotionally charged presence in your writing. How do you see setting shaping your characters' lives? Do you usually begin with a sense of place, or does it emerge alongside your characters?
I love this question because a lot of my novel ideas begin with characters, but actually they are always clearly in a known place from the outset too. I often say that I love to write about London when I'm not in it – it's a place that appears throughout my work because I know it so well, but it has the ability to change entirely depending on the time of day, the season and the location. I think characters can't exist in a vacuum and so just like their relationships, the setting can be a powerful way to elevate who they are, how they feel about their current place in life, and where they see themselves – whether staying in one place or moving elsewhere with new challenges. So even if your setting feels very basic, how your characters interact with it is usually what brings it to life.
What novel do you most frequently find yourself recommending to others?
I have told more people than I can count about two books over the last few years.
Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. What you want to know and understand about the world right now and what humanity is, has been and could be, is in this book.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. It's about belief systems, people power and survival. And a masterclass in how you can simply put forward a point without airs and graces, let the story tell itself and waste no words in the process.
We're so excited to have you on board as an editor and mentor. What do you find most rewarding about supporting budding writers?
I am naturally very nosy so if there's a new story being written, I want to read it! Beyond that though, it's really as simple as wanting to share whatever I've learnt thus far, and helping new writers find their own style and voice and way of putting words out into the world. It sounds cliché but after a handful of years of teaching, there is still something so powerful about talking to a writer about their work, giving them space to feel heard and getting to gently nudge them towards completing a work in progress that I know has real potential to have an impact on the world. Other much more experienced writers did the exact same thing for me when I first started out, and I honestly feel privileged to be able to pay some of that forward.
Could you share your top three tips for writers who are at the start of their writing journey?
- Figure out what your writing routine is. You can try some of the classics to see what works for you, but I always pass this advice on that I was given a few years ago: think about the last thing you wrote that just seemed to flow. How can you recreate that moment, setting or routine and apply it to your new work?
- Be your first fan. I know, it's very hard to feel good about those words on the page, but if you don't like it, how can you expect anyone else to? So start small – whenever you read something back and find yourself impressed that you wrote it, take note of that – those moments will carry you through.
- This is an oldie but a goodie: that first draft is Draft Zero. It is just words on the page, or the slab of marble you've managed to haul into a room, that you've now got to chisel something beautiful out of. But you can't edit nothing, right?
Interested in receiving one-to-one feedback on your manuscript or pitch package? Maame is currently available for mentoring, submission reports and full manuscript reports through our editorial services.
Maame will also be joining our team of tutors, teaching on one of our flagship Writing Your Novel courses next year. Watch this space for the announcement!
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