Rukky Brume: ‘Rewrite, and rewrite again until it feels true’
RELATED COURSES
BY Katie Smart
23rd Jun 2026
In this interview Rukky Brume, debut author of It Comes in Waves and Discoveries 2021 longlistee, shares her advice for writing authentically and bringing settings to life.
‘I hoped to write a story full of truth, beauty and humour, the kind of story that would have made me feel less alone in my grief. It took me long enough, but It Comes in Waves is my attempt.’
We caught up with Rukky to discuss explorations of grief, writing with emotional tension, and what being longlisted for Discoveries meant to her.
Your debut It Comes in Waves follows Onome as she experiences the sudden loss of her father. You beautifully explore the complexities of grief, guilt and mourning. Do you remember what first inspired you to tell this story?
Thank you! I remember all too well. My father died on a September morning in 2011 and I couldn’t make sense of it. I’d experienced loss, but the death of my father, my co-creator, a man who seemed indestructible, floored me. It was isolating, to be grieving on the cusp of adulthood, with everyone around me in bloom. I kept a journal at the time, attempting to wrangle my unruly feelings. It felt impossible – grief is fluid, shape-shifting. If you try to photograph it, it would be a blur. I wrote in my journal that words (which can contain whole worlds) would be the best way to capture this slippery thing and that I would write about grief one day. I hoped to write a story full of truth, beauty and humour, the kind of story that would have made me feel less alone in my grief. It took me long enough, but It Comes in Waves is my attempt.
What advice would you give to writers who want to explore grief in their work but are struggling to write about it with authenticity?
I take authenticity here to mean writing something that feels true. Whether you’ve experienced grief or not, authenticity comes from study, writing and re-writing.
By ‘study’, I mean reading/observing/researching widely on grief. Fiction that resonated before I put pen to paper included: Donna Tartt’s inspirational The Goldfinch, which smuggles grief into an art heist story (or is it the other way round?); Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster; a slice of the excellent Brooklyn by the same author; Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. Later on, between drafts, I read Onyi Nwabineli’s Someday, Maybe and Jessica George’s My Name is Maame, which gave me confidence there’d be appetite for my grief-y story. I haven’t read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo yet because it was published while I was mid-edits but I can’t wait to read it. Non-fiction on grief includes Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking; CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief; Michelle Zauner’s terrific Crying in H-Mart. I saw films too – I must mention Manchester By The Sea written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, which I’ve only been able to watch once so far, it’s that powerful. There’s also so much more discussion around grief now, including essays, blogs (Hana Walker-Brown’s Substack, The Ripe and Ruin comes to mind), documentaries, podcasts and even social media.
By ‘writing’, I mean allowing yourself to do it badly. Let it feel untrue at first.
Then rewrite, and rewrite again until it feels true.
Onome’s life as a student in London contrasts with her family life in Nigeria. These two settings and cultures are deeply influential on Onome’s character and the narrative. How did you approach bringing these worlds – and Urhobo culture in particular – to life on the page?
That’s a great question. It was fun depicting Onome, a Nigerian (and specifically, Urhobo) woman living in London, twice removed from her ancestral land. As she’s a student in London, the geographical scope of the city explored in It Comes in Waves is dictated by her student budget – Onome’s London life is concentrated around her Central London university campus and surrounds, the budget friendly places and activities she and her friends go to or engage in. The best part of bringing Onome’s London to life is that since she’s an outsider, she has all these observations about people and place that I hope provide some levity.
Onome’s Nigeria was challenging and invigorating for me. In Lagos, which appears in fiction more than anywhere else in the country, I didn’t want to make Onome seem like a tour guide. My breakthrough came from understanding Onome better. As the saying goes ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ and the Lagos Onome returns to is not the Lagos she lived in – the city has changed, is still changing, and her father has died. She herself is changing, so she’s constantly comparing her present 2010 Lagos to the Lagos of her memory and at the same time, having now lived in a different city, she’s seeing her familiar city through new eyes. I loved writing the bustle of Lagos (sights, sounds, smells) and Onome’s home life, invaded by mourners of different stripes. Some great writing on Lagos for me is Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (which also features a Lagos returnee), and also Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, which was the first book I read that fictionalised a contemporary Lagos I recognised.
Warri isn’t written about as much as Lagos – Eghosa Imasuen’s Fine Boys is the only contemporary book I’ve read that depicts Warri. I was aware though that I had a big task because I had to create a sense of place as well as weave Urhobo culture into the story organically. Now, Warri isn’t only home to the Urhobo ethnic group – although the Urhobo people are the largest ethnic group in Delta state (between 4.5-7 million people), Itsekiri and Ijaw people are also indigenous to the city. The Warri that emerges on the page is informed by Onome being both a sheltered Urhobo woman and an outsider in her ancestral home, which allowed me to explore customs (especially mourning and funeral customs that were unfamiliar to her) with a level of depth. I must add that villages mentioned were made up for practical reasons, and that the ceremonies described are a fusion of custom and more modern burials with Christian influences.
Throughout, I enjoyed using dialogue to add to the sense of place: the slang in London, the sprinkles of pidgin in Lagos, pidgin and Urhobo in Warri. Also, to ease the transition from place to place, there’s a recurring plane motif, priming Onome and anyone journeying with her for the new destination.
As the novel unfolds, family secrets begin to surface, challenging Onome’s memories of her father. How did you approach revealing these truths while maintaining the emotional tension of the story?
Through developmental edits! The second half of the story was a bit emotionally flat in earlier drafts as I’d concentrated on getting the plot down. I had to come at it again balancing the fact that Onome is shoulder-deep in grief (which isn’t linear) with authentic reactions to what she discovers. A tough balancing act, but I took my time and I had a great editor. Shout out to Ore Agbaje-Williams for challenging me to write the best story I could.
The relationships Onome has with the women in her life are complex and tender, particularly her bonds with her mother, sister and friend Safiya. How important was it for you to centre these female relationships in the novel?
Interesting! I didn’t consciously set out to explore female relationships. I started from trying to depict how Onome’s loss affects her existing relationships and separately, sought to show what it’s like to be a woman in a particular cultural context (incidentally, rather than as a capital ‘T’ theme), but the characters took on a life of their own and I suppose that’s what showed up on the page.
An early draft of the novel was longlisted for the inaugural Discoveries programme. How did that experience shape the development of the book and your growth as a writer?
Being longlisted for Discoveries was huge for me. Unbiased people of repute had read my words and deemed them worthy of recognition. Discoveries doesn’t even have an entry fee – so they’d read my work for FREE and liked it. It was such a boost to my confidence and it made me think: I HAVE to finish this story. Part of the prize for longlisted writers at the time included guidance on our submissions from Curtis Brown Creative and I had some agent interest from my entry, so I knew there would be people waiting to read it when I eventually finished my first draft. Along the way, I attended free workshops through Discoveries, led by the likes of Claire Fuller, which gave me useful tools and encouraged me on the long road to publication. The programme has been developed further to support emerging writers with their writing and also with understanding the publishing world. I’ve been a beneficiary of some excellent initiatives such as the Discoveries Day know-how sessions at a Big 5 publisher, a Q&A with an independent publisher, bookstore visits and the opportunity to read from my work at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last year. Finally, I must mention that Discoveries has given me community; I’m in a WhatsApp group with my cohort of wonderful, supportive women writers and a book club that goes across cohorts. I’d encourage anyone thinking of entering to go for it – it just might change your life.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’m working on something new at the moment. Hopefully it won’t take me almost another decade!
It Comes in Waves is out this week from Merky Books (Penguin).
Rukky was longlisted for the inaugural Discoveries in 2021. Discoveries is an annual writing development programme and prize, inviting all unpublished women writers aged 18 and up, currently residing in the UK or Ireland and writing in English, to submit their works of adult fiction. Curtis Brown Creative are proud to partner with the Women’s Prize Trust, the Curtis Brown literary agency and Audible to run Discoveries. Watch this space, Discoveries 2027 will open for entries later this year.