Michaela Coel is My Writing Hero - Andrew Crofts

I love it when a writer emerges into the limelight and shows themselves to be entirely brilliant. Michaela Coel – the author, co-director, producer and star of BBC series “I May Destroy You”, is my latest hero.

She is young enough to be one of my children and her life experiences are as different to mine as it is possible to be while still being born in the same country, (but only geographically). Listening to her talk and watching her shows has taught me a great deal about worlds that I have virtually no personal experience of. She has helped me understand how other people feel.

Coel has had many of the most unpleasant experiences of life thrust upon her and she writes and talks about them with incredible power and humour. She appears to be entirely fearless in what she says and who she says it to. She lays bare her experiences and her feelings and those of people she knows and loves. The results are so truthful, so painful and so watchable that it is not surprising that her work has been praised to the skies by the critics.

One of the experiences that she talks and writes about, is “being a writer”, and she nails the joys, the frustrations and the agonies of the publishing profession as perfectly as she nails the horrors of rape, racism, sexism and poverty.

Like I say, she’s my hero.