‘If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry’: The festival showcasing the art of working-class writers

A new book festival aims to shine a light on working-class writers. We’ve always been here but now we’re aiming to change the literary landscape for good, says David Barnett

David Bradley in the 1969 film ‘Kes’, based on the book by Barry Hines (Alamy)

When I was 16, I typed with a flourish on the Amstrad word processor (huge beige box of a monitor, green type on a black background) that I had been bought for Christmas a year before the words THE END. I had just completed 130,000 words of my first novel – a turgid portal fantasy with an embarrassing amount of what I imagined great sex to be, which resides, Dorian Gray-like, in a battered old leather valise in my loft, and will never, ever see the light of day in my lifetime.

My dad was passing my bedroom as I finished my magnum opus. “What are you going to do with it now?” he asked.

I shrugged and saved it to a floppy disk. The answer was, nothing. I had been a voracious reader since I was a small child, and around that time I was reading mountains of science fiction and fantasy. I just fancied having a go at writing one myself, really.