ANDREW McMillan’s first novel has been a long time coming. “The idea started when I was at Barnsley College doing my A-Levels,” he explains. His class put on the John Ford 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. That’s when I was 17. The novel ended up is a long way from that, but that’s where that interest in the word ‘pity’ came from.”

Andrew’s debut novel, Pity, explores community, masculinity and post-industrialisation through three generations of a South Yorkshire mining family. The grandfather who worked in the mines, the son who went through the miners’ strike, and the grandson Simon, who is ‘cobbling’ a living in a call centre, as well as having a sideline as a drag act. The book also follows a group of academics, pulling together an oral history of the mining town.

The novel is a lament for a lost way of life, but a celebration of the possibility of change.

The book is a lament for a lost way of living The book is a lament for a lost way of living (Image: Image submitted)

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

Andrew, who’s appearing at Ilkley Literature Festival, felt it was a story that ‘needs to be told.’

“Just looking at the way Barnsley is represented on the news, oftentimes in very erroneous ways, there needs to be a counter-narrative to that which the novel can offer up in some way.”

Pity has had widespread critical acclaim. Author Jon McGregor said: “Pity digs deep into the heart and history of South Yorkshire and brings out the black gold of love, longing, and loss. A triumph.” The Guardian found it “a novel of huge compassion.” Max Porter praised it as a “beautiful book about the marks that are left on people and places in turn leaves a deep empathic mark on the reader.”

Andrew hopes Pity gives readers a more ‘nuanced’ understanding of Barnsley. “I wanted to tell a story that’s very specific to Barnsley, but also something that would have universal appeal. 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.”

The novel is also an exploration of masculinity: “I think all my work’s kind of been interested in masculinity, and turning the male gaze onto other men, not necessarily sexuality, but just that sense of trying to interrogate masculinity is always something I’ve been interested in doing.”

As his first novel, it presented a different set of challenges to poetry, which has earned him awards including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize. “It’s something I wanted to do for a long time. I wanted to challenge myself to see if I had it in me, and stretch something into a longer form. Poetry exists in the margins of a life, and you can do little bits of it now and then, but a novel demanded writing daily. The size of it is so big. With poetry, you think, oh that line isn’t working, whereas with a novel the entire architecture of it is a challenge.”

He enjoyed the different approach. “My poetry often begins in real life, in the self. There’s this joy of writing a novel, and saying, I’m going to make it up. Of course, I’m from Barnsley and there’s elements of truth in it, but it’s just that joy of being able to invent in a way I didn’t in poetry, so I feel less exposed.”

Ilkley Literature Festival has long championed poets - emerging, local talent as well as iconic names in the field. WH Auden opened the first festival in 1973 and it commissioned works from Ted Hughes and worked with Simon Armitage to create the 50-mile Stanza Stones poetry trail. Andrew was its Poet in Residence in 2016 after being the festival’s Apprentice Poet in Residence in 2010. His dad is the ‘Bard of Barnsley’ Ian McMillan.

“It was a privilege of growing up surrounded by books, and certainly contemporary poetry books and knowing that poets are living people and that they’re alive and writing now,” says Andrew.

He’s passionate about being a writer of and from the north: “Because of what dad is, and what he really believes in, I grew up knowing that where we were from was worthy of writing about. So, your voice, your accent, your town, or village is worthy of writing about, and that is something I’ve tried to carry forward.

“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 I’ve got a load of gay friends who live in Barnsley and who are really happy, and have great lives there. So that idea 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 you’re in.”

Ilkley Literature Festival, the North’s longest-running literary festival, features over 90 events from October 4-20. Andrew joins an epic line-up of literary acts including Prue Leith, Kate Atkinson, Carol Ann Duffy and Julian Clary.

* Andrew McMillan and Catherine Taylor, whose memoir The Stirrings explores her growing up in the North in the 1970s and 80s, will discuss writing northern stories and voices at Ilkley Playhouse, Saturday, October 5 at 12noon. Visit ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk