Northern Highlight - Pete Kalu

NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT

PETE KALU

Why did you become a writer?

To try to make sense of the world and to share the sense I made of it. I never felt I fitted in as a kid, and by writing and populating fictitious worlds, I felt I could create a space where I belonged, where I made sense. 

Tell us about where you live.

I live in a 2 bed terrace in Manchester, ten minutes by bus from the city centre. As I type, I have a view of a purple-flowering Peruvian potato plant and a swinging red punch bag. This view is slightly obscured by a row of cleaning fluid containers, air freshener cans and empty wine glasses. So far, the hundred-year-old Welsh slate roof has been sound in the storms. I have a roof over my head.

Where do you work?

Writing work? If so, I tend to compose pretty much anywhere – while driving my car, dozing in the bath, perched on the sofa, wearing out the e, a and s keys of my keyboard, at my desk, else gabbling into a voice recorder at a friend’s place. 

Published by HopeRoad Publishing Ltd

What for you is the 'spirit of the North'?

As a black person living in Manchester, the North is probably the train line that takes us from Liverpool through Manchester across to Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford. Its spirit was never better captured than in the moment Steel Pulse (of Birmingham!) hooded up to play their classic ditty, Ku Klux Klan at the Rock Against Racism rally at Alexandra Park in 1978, as part of Northern Carnival Against Racism. I was there. So too, to my shock and absolute delight, was my (white) secondary school English teacher.

Has this spirit influenced your work?

Yes the promise of a better world has always been a motivation to keep on

at the keyboard, joining other writers in a march of words with which we intend to bring down the Walls of Jericho!

Who for you are the great Northern writers or illustrators?

Elaine Okoro is a poet who few people have heard of, but whose work in the 80s (primarily her poetry collection Thoughts, Feelings, Lovers) was astonishingly mature and gave a dimension to Northern black life that nobody before had chronicled. The poet, SuAndi is another phenomenal North based poet, as is the magnificent Lemn Sissay. Of prose writers, the short story writer and novelist Neil Campbell is off-the-scale talented, and deeply unknown. I’d say the same of the novelist, Mike Duff, particularly regarding his novel Low Life. Sheffield based, Desiree Reynolds too is a scorchingly skilled novelist who is destined for greatness, though that greatness will have to be thrust upon her as she is not one to blow her own trumpet. Tariq Mehmood, when he gets his ducks in a line, is a fabulous YA writer, fearless, compassionate and combative. I could go on. I’m less familiar with illustrators. We are blessed to have both Josephe Cocles and Ian Bobb in the North. They are fine-fine painters who occasionally illustrate.

If you could be transported to anywhere in the North right now,

where would it be?

 Jam St bar in Old Trafford, Manchester on Saturday night about 11.50pm when the chess players have finished up, heads are fuzzed, & the band starting to sizzle: the singer’s soaring to a climax, the drummer’s flinging off high hats, & the bass player holding it all down in a film of perfumed sweat as Sugar Minott’s Good Thing Going spreads the love. Damn, I miss it. 

What would you like to see from children's publishing in the North?

 A posse of Northern publishers saddle up and ride to London demanding the hard-wired devolution of resources from the South to the North. The manual for How to Be Politely But Very Effectively Racist While Working in Publishing ripped up (there is such a manual, surely?). A concerted effort to foster the long-term growth of Northern writers, illustrators, publicists and editors, particularly black ones, given the current deficit. A public commitment to working-class voices and Northern settings. That’s probably enough to be getting on with.

9. What's your favourite children's book set in the North?

 Apart from any of my own? *smiles* For sheer, ground-breaking verve and the audacity to address the themes of race and war in a YA book, and despite a raft of typos that somehow escaped the proofreaders, my favourite has to be the Frances Lincoln Award-winning You’re Not Proper by Tariq Mehmood.  

Published by HopeRoad Publishing Ltd

Published by HopeRoad Publishing Ltd

You can find Pete Kalu on Twitter @peterkalu and on Instagram petekalu 

Pete runs the Facebook page Pendemicus with Tariq Mahmood and Mevin Burgess (https://www.facebook.com/pendemicus/)