Common People

by Kit de Waal

  Emma Purshouse, ‘Misspent Youth’

  Emma Purshouse left school in the early 1980s at the age of fifteen, initially working on various government schemes interspersed with bouts of extreme unemployment. She gave education another go as a mature student, attaining a BA from Wolverhampton University and an MA in creative writing from Manchester Met.

  For the last twelve years Emma has been making a living as a writer and performance poet. Her passion is writing about the working-class communities that she has lived in, often making use of Black Country dialect within her work. In 2017 she won the international Making Waves spoken-word poetry competition judged by Luke Wright. Emma co-runs a successful spoken-word night in the Black Country.

  Loretta Ramkissoon, ‘Which Floor?’

  Loretta Ramkissoon is an Italian–Mauritian Londoner who was brought up by her grandparents on a council estate in Edgware Road. Her love of languages led her to complete a BA in Modern Languages from UCL and an MA in Translation Studies from Durham University, all whilst working part-time as a shop assistant. She has since been a translator, project manager and copy editor. Though she has been writing stories since she was ten, Which Floor? is her first published piece, and she is currently working on her first novel. She speaks five languages and enjoys sunsets and karaoke.

  Cathy Rentzenbrink, ‘Darts’

  Cathy Rentzenbrink is the author of The Last Act of Love and A Manual for Heartache. Cathy regularly chairs literary events, judges prizes, interviews authors, reviews books and runs writing workshops, and thinks that most lives would be enriched by more reading and writing. She won the Snaith and District Ladies’ Darts Championship when she was seventeen but is now sadly out of practice.

  Riley Rockford, ‘Domus Operandi’

  Riley Rockford grew up in East Anglia and spent most of her holidays in Scotland. Now, she loves living in her east London neighbourhood. She manages projects in education and the community, especially relating to writing and/or social justice in some way. At university, she studied literature and culture, focusing on strategic silence, surveillance and standpoint theory. After a break of a few years, she went back to study part-time while working full-time, and after five years graduated with a PhD in creative writing.

  Jodie Russian-Red, ‘The Funeral and the Wedding’

  Jodie Russian-Red is a part-time administrator, part-time writer in Nottingham. Over the past few years she has primarily written for performance art and spoken word and has had writing and performing commissions for Freedom Festival in Hull, The Collection in Lincoln. She was invited to be a featured guest at the spoken word event Women of Words in Hull in 2017. For the last two years she has written a weekly newsletter in the form of a personal memoir blog for the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham, where she also holds a completely unrelated day job processing invoices, ordering stationery and monitoring coffee levels.

  Anita Sethi, ‘On Class and the Countryside’

  Anita Sethi was born in and grew up in Manchester, UK. She has been published in several anthologies including the Seasons nature writing anthology, Three Things I’d Tell My Younger Self, Seaside Special, We Mark Your Memory and the forthcoming Women on Nature. She has written for publications including the Guardian, the Observer, Granta, Times Literary Supplement and The Pool, and appeared on BBC radio. She has been a Writer in Residence in Melbourne, Australia.

  Adam Sharp, ‘Play’

  Adam Sharp is originally from Manchester but has also lived in London, Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland, the Channel Islands, the Canary Islands, Nashville and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He has had over thirty jobs: some of these include catching footballs, juggling bottles, washing dishes, reviewing music, changing nappies and walking on stilts. He now spends his time working on books and has written four so far. @AdamCSharp

  Adelle Stripe, ‘Driftwood’

  Adelle Stripe is a novelist and poet from Yorkshire. She grew up in a small brewery town and was a Girl Friday for many years before starting university as a mature student. Her debut novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017), is inspired by the life and work of playwright Andrea Dunbar. It received the K. Blundell Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Quietus, New Statesman and the Guardian. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University and lives in the Calder Valley.

  Eva Verde, ‘I Am Not Your Tituba’

  Eva Verde is a writer from Forest Gate, east London. She is of dual heritage. Identity and class are recurring themes throughout her work. While studying towards an MA in Creative Writing, she is also working on her first novel about a woman’s hedonistic rebellion against familial ties and societal pressures. Eva lives in Essex with her husband, three children and elderly black Labrador. Her inclusion in Common People is her first time in print.

  Lynne Voyce, ‘A Brief History of Industrial Action, Vauxhall Motors, Ellesmere Port’

  Lynne Voyce grew up on a council estate in Ellesmere Port, a place full of larger-than-life characters, tall tales and the odd dodgy deal. Inspired by her dad buying The Literary Classics Collection with some of his redundancy money, she studied English at the University of Leeds, and went on to take a teaching qualification and then a postgraduate degree in educational psychology. Lynne now works in an inner-city comprehensive school in Birmingham. She has published more than fifty individual short stories, won a number of literary competitions, and, in December 2015, published her first story collection, Kirigami, with Ink Tears Press. She is currently working on her first novel.

  Tony Walsh (aka Longfella), ‘Tough’

  Tony Walsh FRSA, also known as Longfella, is a professional poet, writer, performer and educator based in Manchester. A former Poet in Residence at Glastonbury Festival, his work has been commissioned by the Guardian, the Observer, Channel 4 News, the Imperial War Museum, the Lake District National Park and many times by BBC television and radio. Tony’s work has been widely anthologised, published in the UK and USA, and is collated into two full collections for adults: SEX & LOVE & ROCK&ROLL (2013) and WORK | LIFE | BALANCE (2019), both with the fiercely indie Burning Eye Books. He has also collaborated on two picture books for small children with more planned. A passionate educator, Tony leads acclaimed workshops in schools, colleges and universities from Keswick to Kazakhstan, as well as with refugees, asylum seekers, prisoners and socially excluded people in a wide range of settings.

  After being raised in council housing and dropping out of the University of Salford in the mid-eighties, Tony was unemployed for eighteen months, worked in a sausage factory, an industrial bakery and on a Post Office counter, where he was tied up at gunpoint, before an eighteen-year career managing inner-city housing and regeneration projects for local authorities. His poem ‘This Is the Place’ made headlines worldwide when performed at the vigil for victims of the Manchester Arena bomb in May 2017, subsequently raising around £200,000 for local charities. Tony was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by his former university in 2018.

  Alex Wheatle, ‘Dear Nobody’

  Alex Wheatle’s first novel, Brixton Rock, was published to critical acclaim by BlackAmber Books in 1999. He won the London Arts Board Writers Prize in 2000 and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2008. His first young adult novel, Liccle Bit, was published in 2015 and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2015. His novel Crongton Knights, published in 2016, won the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Award for 2016 and the Renaissance Quiz Writers’ Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Bookseller Young Adult prize.

  Helen Wilber, ‘Underdogs’

  Helen Wilber lives in Leicester but was born and raised in Mexborough, South Yorkshire. This is the first time her work has been published, but hopefully not the last. Helen was inspired to start writing after a brief spell working in a library. She mainly writes short stories but has recently been experimenting with different
forms, including writing for radio. Helen works full-time and currently writes at weekends and in the evening. When she’s not writing, she likes riding her bike and thinking of things to write. @wilber_wall

  Elaine Williams, ‘Night’

  Sheffield-born Elaine Williams has lived in London for three decades. A graduate of the National Film and Television School, she worked in film and TV as a sound recordist, and in the computer games industry as a sound designer. She is a teacher/lecturer/tutor and has worked in secondary, Post16 and adult education; she is currently a specialist teacher in the alternative education sector. Formative to her writing life was her (early noughties) freelance journalism for Calabash, a literary magazine that profiled African, Caribbean and Asian writers. She has an MA in Narrative Non-Fiction from City University and is currently working on her first book, a collection inspired by memories of her late father. In 2016, Elaine was shortlisted for the Penguin Random House WriteNow mentoring scheme. In September 2018, she was selected for The London Writers Award professional development programme.

  Shaun Wilson, ‘Passengers’

  Shaun Wilson was born in 1980 and raised in Wigton, Cumbria. In 2011, after fifteen years as a guitarist and lyricist in various rock-and-roll bands, he began learning to write prose. He currently works as a postman and studies towards an MA in creative writing at Northumbria University. In his spare time, he co-edits the university’s creative magazine, Edge. He was shortlisted for a Northern Writers’ Award in 2018 and for a WriteNow mentorship in 2018. @smw_writing

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