As Andrew McMillan heads to Durham Book Festival, Ann Chadwick spoke to him about finding literature, happiness, and love.

Can literature transform lives? “God, yeah, I think so,” Andrew McMillan says.

The poet is something of a northern star for New Writing North.The writing development charity in Newcastle delivers a wealth of workshops, awards, events, and produces the Durham Book Festival each year for Durham County Council.

Its mission is to give a leg-up to talent - particularly to those in underserved communities in the north. Andew launched the Tempest Prize last year with the charity, which offers a bursary and mentoring from Andrew to an unpublished LGBTQ+ writer based in the north. He’s also appearing at this year’s Durham Book Festival in October, to discuss his first novel, Pity.

The son of a poet (Ian McMillan, known as the Bard of Barnsley), he’s acutely aware of “the privilege of growing up surrounded by books.”

Andrew’s speaking from his home in Manchester, where he works as a Professor of Contemporary Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

“One of the things I’ve been really keen to do is pay forward the privilege and good fortune I was raised in, because of who dad was. I want to pay that forward, and the prize for new queer northern writing we’ve set up with New Writing North is an example of that. I think literature can be– not only something to read to see difference, as something that builds empathy, but also, an encouragement for everyone to be able to tell their own story, and see value in their own life and where they’re from. And that where they’re from could be worthy of literature; that is something I do believe in at the core of my being.”

As well as championing the place he grew up, he’s passionate about supporting diverse northern voices.

“All you want ultimately is that wherever someone’s born in the country and whatever their economic circumstances, that shouldn’t be a barrier to working in the artistic industries they want to work in, that they should never be an inclination that they have to move to London for example in order to get a job in publishing or get on in any way. It should be just as easy to live in Barnsley and do that as it is to live in London. It’s not, but it’s a generational progress. We have to continually remind ourselves that we all benefit when we hear stories and create art in every part of the country.”

He's wary though of the idea literature is enough in itself.

“A book isn’t a replacement for the closure of Sure Start centres or the brutal austerity meted out on places like Barnsley during the past decade. These things have economic and legislative answers, which then hopefully can lead to more investment in culture, can lead to more investment in communities, and that then leads to new generations of artists and writers feeling they’ve got the freedom to create.”

Andrew, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is a multi-award-winning poet; his debut collection of poetry ten years ago, physical, was the only poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award. It also won a Somerset Maugham Award and Northern Writers Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, amongst others.

The idea of his first novel, Pity, has germinated for some time. It began when he was 17 at Barnsley College, and his A-level class put on the renaissance play, Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

“Originally, I thought I wonder what it would be to write a contemporary version of that play set in Barnsley. The novel ended up is a long way from that, but that’s where that interest in the word ‘pity’ came from.”

Pity tells the story of three generations of a Barnsley family, rooted in mining – the granddad who worked down the pit, the father who went through the miners’ strike, and his son, Alex, who works in a call centre on the edge of Barnsley, cobbling a living in a town decimated by the collapse of its mining industry. Alex also has a weekend drag show in Sheffield, and Only Fans sex work. The novel also follows a group of academics who come to Barnsley to record an oral history of the mine.

“Really, at its heart it’s about who gets to tell the story of a place; so, these conflicting ideas of what the truth of a place might be.”

Was he conscious of Billy Eliot and Pride when it came to revisiting a story about masculinity, sexuality, and a mining town?

“Not really, I love Pride as a film, and Billy Eliot makes me cry every time I watch it. I wanted to tell a story that’s very specific to Barnsley, and that felt really important, but also something that would have universal appeal, and I was thinking a lot about this idea in literature at school we studied these great American novels that are set in these small towns that we’ve never been to or go to, but we’re told the small American town stands for the world, and it seems to me that Barnsley was also the story of large parts of the North East, Wales, industry-built Europe, America – anywhere that’s had that rapid and violent deindustrialisation. That’s what I was thinking.”

Andrew was recently asked to write a piece for the Guardian on what northern literature is.

“Of course, the answer to that is it’s different for every single person, there’s a myriad, prismatic number of different things it could be.”

Putting Barnsley on the literary map was a driving mission. He hopes readers get two things from the novel: “To maybe leave with a deeper, more nuanced subtler understanding of Barnsley the place, that it’s not maybe the place the national media show as it only gets reported when something bad happens there, that it’s more complex place. But ultimately, for people to think, I wonder what the story of my town would be? Or the story of my village, if I told it.”

Telling those stories, he says, “elevates those places to the position of literature.”

“It’s interesting because I’m a poet before I’m a novelist. Poetry, more so than novels, is marginalised. Very few people read poetry on a day-to-day basis, but everyone wants one for a funeral or a wedding. As a poet, the thing your friends who don’t read poetry ask the most is, oh someone’s died, is there a poem I can read for the funeral? There is a sense that poetry is this thing for great occasions, and we do have a sense of literature being for these important moments, and so I’ve always felt in choosing to write about a certain place, or a certain village or town, that you’re also planting a flag in the ground, saying, yeah, this is worthy of literature as well, it doesn’t have to be a big city.“

"And also, I think you don’t have to leave. So many stories are about the person who leaves the northern town in order to be happy in the big city – that’s often the gay story – but also, I’ve got a load of gay friends who live in Barnsley and who are really happy, and have really great lives there. So that idea as of this sense of it doesn’t have to be elsewhere, you don’t have to leave to find literature, or happiness, or love. It might be in the town that you’re in, and that sometimes that’s a story we’re not told as often.”

Andrew McMillan is in conversation with Tawseef Khan discussing their northern-set debut novels, Pity and Determination, at Gala Durham for Durham Book Festival on Sunday 13 October. To book and for the full festival programme, https://newwritingnorth.com/