Poet Andrew McMillan on mixing mining communities and drag queens in his debut novel Pity

After Barnsley voted to leave in 2016, poet Andrew McMillan watched the town he grew up in get written off. He tells Nick Duerden why his first novel, a multigenerational story of a mining community in which gruff fathers watch their sons’ drag shows, was a way of reclaiming his roots

Poet Andrew McMillan releases his debut novel ‘Pity’ this week (Sophie Davidson)

It is mid-morning, the middle of the week, and Andrew McMillan is at work. Like all poets, even the really successful ones (and McMillan has won awards), he necessarily has other strings to his bow. And so, for the past seven years, the 35-year-old has been a teacher of creative writing at Manchester’s Metropolitan University. His office is predictably utilitarian; the filing cabinet behind him doesn’t even boast a pot plant, and the string for the venetian blind needs untangling.

“I don’t think it was ever an ambition to end up in academia, but I do love it here,” he says, smiling. “I came to it through community work, and then kind of drifted sideways into it. It’s a space of ideas, a place in which I feel really happy.”

McMillan has been writing poetry since his early twenties. There have been three books to date, each with titles in lower-case capitals, as poets are occasionally wont to do: physical (2015), playtime (2018) and pandemonium (2021), which between them have dealt with themes of depression, masculinity, gay adolescence and love, each replete with brooding.