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| 7pm Tuesday March 19th at Gloucester Road Books |
| An event to celebrate the rediscovery of a lost classic. |
| Join us to hear the extraordinary story of the republication of a lost classic of working-class literature, Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks. The man responsible for bringing the novel back to life, bartender turned literary detective Jack Chadwick, will be in conversation with the book’s publisher, Nick Skidmore.
Jack Chadwick stumbled across Caliban Shrieks two years ago in Salford’s Working Class Movement Library. Originally published in 1935 and praised by luminaries such as George Orwell and W.H. Auden, Hilton’s semi-autobiographical novel captures the hardship and toil of the 20th Century’s turbulent, war-blighted times.
With new introductions by Andrew McMillan and Chadwick, the story of Caliban Shriek’s creation is every bit as extraordinary as the man whose life it tells. The same is true of its long overdue reappearance. |
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| More on Caliban Shrieks from publisher, Vintage:
From a childhood of poverty, yet also of joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war, Caliban Shrieks’ narrator takes readers on a lyrical tour of the life of a young man born into the first days of the twentieth century.
A novel of men and women wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical debut remains a bold invitation to enter the whirlwind of an existence rarely seen in the literature of its era.
Lost to time, only to be rediscovered in the Salford Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British fiction, that continues to speak as brashly and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935. |
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Jack Hilton was born in the opening days of 1900 in Oldham, Lancashire. He served in the army during the First World War and, after a period of homelessness and working odd jobs, became an active member of Rochdale’s Worker’s rights movement, where his rallying speeches led to a court-order banning him from further speechwriting. Instead, Hilton turned to prose writing as an outlet, using stints on the dole to hone his immense literary gift and produce his autobiographical novel, Caliban Shrieks.
A chance encounter with an editor in 1934 led to Hilton’s discovery and paved the way for a short, but dramatic, writing career that included the publication of five books –including Caliban Shrieks – and greatly influenced the course of political writing in British literature. In 1950, Hilton retired from writing and returned to his first trade, plastering. He died in 1983.
Jack Chadwick is a writer and journalist based in Colombia. Before writing, he was a barman in Manchester during which time he discovered the lost classic of English working-class literature, Caliban Shrieks. He is currently working to reveal another hidden masterpiece: the autobiography of a former member of a Colombian paramilitary organisation.
The event will take place on 7pm Tuesday March 19th in the shop. |
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