I’ve lived all my life in the north of England; in Barnsley for 18 years, then Lancaster, then Barnsley briefly again, then Liverpool for a while before settling in Manchester. In my poetry, particularly my debut, physical, and now in a novel, Pity, I’ve always been interested in what role writing can play in celebrating and rethinking place; how it might illuminate silences, or cut through the radio static of assumptions. It’s an interest that was, perhaps, inevitable having a poet for a father, who always encouraged all of us, myself and my two sisters, to see where we lived and how we talked as equal to anywhere and anyone else.
The collection physical was my attempt to surface same-sex desire, the fragility of masculinity and the legacy of rapid and often brutal de-industrialisation in the northern town and then the northern city that I lived in. More recently, with Pity, I wanted to interrogate what narratives exist about a place and who gets to tell them. I wanted, in the words of the great north-east poet Barry MacSweeney, to stand at the coalface, like Hamlet, and strike a match.
