Sometimes it seems that Leeds has more than its fair share of festivals. They cover just about every type of alcoholic drink, various kinds of food, film, tech, comic books, and music in all its forms as well as Leeds International Festival featured on this very page…..
…..so it came as quite a surprise that not only does Leeds not have a City-wide Literature Festival but it never has. This bombshell was dropped by Carl Hutton, the Chief Executive of The Leeds Library, which was the venue for the launch of the inaugural Leeds Lit Festival, an event designed to put matters right, or should that be write.
Yvette Huddleston is an author and journalist based in Yorkshire, whose books include The Barefoot Shepherdess and A Day In A Dale. David Peace is an internationally acclaimed author and, with Ms Huddleston, a perfect person to kick off the event. His most famous book is Damned United, telling of the forty-four days of Brian Clough’s tenure as the manager of Leeds United, which has been made into a film and a brilliant play. The Red Riding Quartet, which was condensed into a trilogy and made into a TV series, tell of police corruption and are set in the years 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983. The case of the Yorkshire Ripper takes up most of the action but other crimes, both fictional and based on fact, are covered. GB84, a novel about the Miners’ Strike and Red or Dead, telling the story of Bill Shankley’s reign at Liverpool Football Club – which lasted considerably longer than Clough’s forty-four days – followed.
Before the conversation began in earnest, we were treated to a reading from Damned United by its author, which brought a new dimension to the work as far as I am concerned. For those of you unfamiliar with David Peace’s work, his style is ‘individual’. The pages in the Damned United are split into two, with half being in italics enabling the story to be told in two parts simultaneously, before and after Clough’s appointment. He also uses repetition to good effect and this was illustrated in the passage he read.
Yvette Huddleston was brilliant at interviewing and elicited some very interesting information from David Peace, including the fact that when his first book was turned down by ‘every publisher in the country’ he moved to Istanbul. The most surprising thing, however, was that he wrote Damned United and the Red Riding Quartet while living and teaching in Tokyo. He said that because he was not on the internet at that time he did all of his research by reading the biographies and autobiographies written about the various players and managers in the Leeds United episode. The background to the miners’ strike was also researched in the old fashioned way via books and newspaper articles.
After more background on David Peace’s work, he read a passage from his book Patient X. The subject of the novel is Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, who is a writer of short stories, so the book is written in small sections to reflect this. I mentioned that his style is individual. The passage in question was once again repetitive, illustrating the way that the subject read book after book through fear of going out into the real world. Spellbinding.
Following the reading, the floor was thrown open for questions, the final one of which was ‘Why do you write?’ Mr Peace responded to this by saying that if he wasn’t writing he didn’t feel comfortable. He writes for the pleasure of it and will copy passages from other authors to see how they are constructed and what happens when they are changed around – a man truly dedicated to his art.
Leeds Lit Festival runs from 6th to 10th March at various locations throughout the City and will celebrate the literature scene in Leeds with local writers, performers and artists showcasing their talents.
Editor’s comment: If the launch is an indicator of what Leeds Lit Fest has in store, then Festival-goers are in for many treats.
For a full list of events please visit www.leedslitfest.co.uk
For more information on The Leeds Library please go to https://www.theleedslibrary.org.uk
