On 13 Dec 2016 I joined Alan Milburn and others to debate “seeking social mobility solutions: is equality of opportunity in higher education and the professions possible within the current system?” at Inner Temple in London. SOLD OUT
On 5 October I’m giving a free public talk at Leeds Central Library on Flappers and Factory Girls: how young women changed Britain. This invitation, from historians Kate Dossett and Laura King at Leeds University, means a lot to me. As readers of The People will know, my mum hails from Hunslet in Leeds. My first book, Young women, work, and family in England 1918-1950 has a front cover photo of young women workers at a Leeds factory (it is currently priced at 93 quid by Oxford University Press; more than most of those women earned in a year). I am very grateful to the wonderful West Yorkshire Archive Service for allowing me to use that photo and for their help in locating it. For lots of reasons Leeds is a very special city, and I’m delighted to be invited to speak there. For more details see the Events page.
On 3 November 2016 come to Salford’s brilliant Working Class Movement Library to learn more about Shelagh Delaney from me, and to see MaD Theatre Company read a new play by Charlotte Delaney, Sweet Responsibility, about women and friendship. More on the events page.
AT 6pm on 12 May 2016 I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on dramatising poverty. This talk precedes a performance of the play Boy at the Almeida Theatre. Tickets for the discussion and for Boy are available from the Almeida. For more details of the talk click here.
The People was recently chosen by Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) as a must-read for teachers, in the TES list of ‘books every teacher should read’. I’m absolutely delighted to be honoured by a union that does so much to defend comprehensive education.
I’m delighted that Chatto and Windus will be publishing my next 2 books: Snakes and Ladders – a history of social mobility in Britain since 1900 – and Tastes of Honey, the authorised biography of the playwright Shelagh Delaney. Snakes and Ladders will appear in 2019, Tastes of Honey shortly after.
