The Working Class Library

In this episode of the Working Class Library, David Peace joins Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, to discuss David Storey’s classic, controversial 1960 kitchen-sink novel, This Sporting Life . This Sporting Life , said The Guardian , “provided one of the great energising shocks of the 1960s, a blast of energy smashing at the dullness, comp...

In the sixth episode of the Working Class Library, Kevin Barry joins Claire Malcolm, chief executive of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, to discuss Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes. McCourt’s account of his poverty-stricken childhood in New York and Limerick has sold ten million copies to date, and has been translated into more than 25 languages. Previously reluc...

For the fifth episode of the Working Class Library , the novelist David Nicholls joins Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee , and to discuss Sue Townsend’s 1982 novel The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾.  Having initially been written for, and broadcast on, BBC Radio 4, The Secret Diary was the United Kingdom’s bestselling book of the 1980s, and to...

For this episode, Richard and Claire are joined by novelist Sarah Hall to consider Flora Thompson’s memoir Lark Rise to Candleford.  These days, Lark Rise to Candleford is perhaps the best-known English rural memoir in print. Thanks in no small part to the BBC’s 2000s TV adaptation, and historic class-washing in its jackets and illustrations, it is commonly thought of as a rather cosily nostalgic...

For this episode of the Working Class Library, the writer Craig McLean joins Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, to discuss Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting. Trainspotting has become, as McLean says, a multi-media “literary industrial complex”, with prequels, sequels, films, theatre productions and a mooted TV series having given its characters l...

Readers who came to Hilary Mantel after her double-Booker-winning success with Wolf Hall made her a star of the literary world may not be aware that she grew up in a working-class home in a Derbyshire mill town. She, however, said many times that that background had a decisive influence on her as a person and a writer, and in Giving Up the Ghost she shows how. In the end, her status as a working-c...

Gissing wrote New Grub Street to skewer the new literary crowd as books boomed with the arrival of mass education in Britain. What does it teach us about book publishing, the British class system and working class writers today?