I have written the Great Leeds Novel. Somebody had to.

You may have noticed that Leeds doesn’t have the richest literary tradition. We’ve had no major literary school, no defining scene. We have produced a few household names, but they seemed disinclined to write the Great Leeds Novel. Alan Bennett left for Oxford seven decades ago and likes writing about George III and Elizabeth II. When he finally penned a play about schoolboys in the North, loosely based on his experiences in Leeds, he set it in Sheffield. Ouch. That hurts, Alan. He didn’t even give his archive to Leeds University, he gave it to Oxford. This is beginning to feel personal.

Then there’s Keith Waterhouse. Billy Liar could have been the Great Leeds Novel, but he decided to set it in a fictional location. He wrote a novel set in Soho, literally called Soho, and even a play about Jeffrey Bernard, but never turned his talents to the subject of Leeds. Think about that. He was more interested in writing about a journalist who drank so much his leg fell off than the city that made him. You can’t help but feel rejected.

Leeds does appear in the oeuvre of Barbara Taylor Bradford, but in novels that are transatlantic, with the action centred in New York as you might expect of someone who left Leeds for New York. Oh well, at least she donated her archive to Leeds University.  

But at long last the Great Leeds Novel has arrived! Published by London’s prestigious Black Spring Press, Young Man From Leeds is a dark comedy—wait, wait, wait. Stop the article…

Where do you get off calling your own book great?

Good question. I’m not the one calling it great. It was accepted after a rave review by the poet Ezra Miles, a Londoner. He called it “the funniest book about Britain written this century”. It’s published by Todd Swift, the Canadian poet and scholar who has kept Black Spring stubbornly independent while most of the publishing world was hoovered up by corporations, which gives him the freedom to take risks on books the mainstream ignores – like Young Man From Leeds, which, as I was saying, is a dark comedy rooted in the tradition of transgressive fiction, following in the footsteps of Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Hubert Selby.

It was originally a sitcom script. It was optioned by Objective Productions, producers of Peep Show, and later by Paul Garner, of The Chris Morris Music Show and Brass Eye fame. Despite such enviable endorsements, the script went nowhere, which in hindsight is no surprise. It was pitched back when audiences began shifting to streamers, and British TV bosses responded by dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator. Channels instructed writers to submit scripts that were ‘not intelligent’ and had ‘low mental engagement’. One commissioner put it bluntly: “We’re making a show for thick Northerners.”

Not the best climate for a comic psychodrama about a menswear manager trapped in his shop by low wages, rent, and debt – and hell-bent on escape.

So, now it comes to you in the form of a luxurious hardback, lavishly illustrated, and wrapped in a Joycean, Bodley Head-style dust jacket. You can order it directly from the publisher if you want a signed copy (and who wouldn’t?). Otherwise, it’ll be available via Amazon, Waterstones, and even Barnes & Noble, in case you’re reading this in New York and need another Leeds fix after working your way through Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 40 novels.

Great Leeds Novel or not, it is a Leeds novel. Try it?

By Neil Hunter

Illustrations by Paul Hunter

Young Man From Leeds