Poet Andrew McMillan on mixing mining communities and drag queens in his debut novel Pity

It is mid-morning, the middle of the week, and Andrew McMillan is at work. Like all poets, even the really successful ones (and McMillan has won awards), he necessarily has other strings to his bow. And so, for the past seven years, the 35-year-old has been a teacher of creative writing at Manchester’s Metropolitan University. His office is predictably utilitarian; the filing cabinet behind him doesn’t even boast a pot plant, and the string for the venetian blind needs untangling.

“I don’t think it was ever an ambition to end up in academia, but I do love it here,” he says, smiling. “I came to it through community work, and then kind of drifted sideways into it. It’s a space of ideas, a place in which I feel really happy.”

McMillan has been writing poetry since his early twenties. There have been three books to date, each with titles in lower-case capitals, as poets are occasionally wont to do: physical (2015), playtime (2018) and pandemonium (2021), which between them have dealt with themes of depression, masculinity, gay adolescence and love, each replete with brooding.

Physical won the Guardian’s First Book Award, the first poetry collection to do so. He is now about to publish a novel, Pity. You can tell it’s the work of a poet not just because of its distinctly spare style, and by how much blank space features on so many of its pages, but also due to its brevity: just 30,000 words. Much as with McMillan in person – he is polite but reserved, and feels little compulsion to fill in silences – there is a deliberate absence of emotion to the narrative, as if plenty is being withheld. What the characters don’t say is often as revealing as what they do.

It tells the story of three generations of what once had been a mining family in Barnsley, South Yorkshire – the grandfather, the father, and the son, each trying to get by in their respective worlds. This year is the 40th anniversary of the miner’s strike, and so Pity further helps bring the past back into the present.

In the grandfather’s day, life could feel simple, preordained, not something to have existential crises over. “Nobody speaks,” McMillan writes of a typical morning from decades past. It’s a world where men, “incline their heads as someone else joins them and then keep on walking. More and more men fall out of their houses like dominoes, their faces not yet blackened.”

But things grow more complicated for his successors. The father is now in middle age, no longer married, and beginning at last to recognise the part of his identity he’d previously felt it necessary to conceal. His son, Simon, has never known the coalpits and works in a call centre during the week, spending his weekends performing as a drag act and, occasionally, making provocative films of himself for the website Only Fans.

Their respective stories are relayed, variously, in the third-person, through research notes written up by a visiting TV production crew, and via transcription from CCTV footage. McMillan, a Barnsley native, says he wanted to tell this story in prose rather than poetry, “because to write a novel felt like a challenge.” Nevertheless, and despite its brevity, it took him many years, and many rewrites. It wasn’t until he began reading the fiction of the Booker-longlisted author Jon McGregor that he at last found a convincing voice.

“As a poet, I’ve always been attracted to the economy of language, and Jon McGregor is the lodestar for that, the writer who’s had the most influence on me.” McGregor’s novels include If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Even the Dogs and Reservoir 13, and are distinctive for their unadorned immediacy. “That kind of austere style, really stripped back to plainness, with not even speech marks – that really appealed to me, and it helped me find my way forward.”

Pity is, in many ways, a melancholic book, detailing the slow death of a town so cursorily overlooked in the political landscape, and summarily ignored by successive governments. “After the pits closed down, it really did feel a million miles from Westminster,” McMillan says, “and when the Brexit vote happened in 2016, Barnsley voted in large part to leave.”

Of those who elected to vote Leave, he says that, “I was fascinated by how these people I’d always thought of as quite left-leaning and in-the-world were [so easily dismissed] by so many people who just said insulting things about them. I remember Channel 4 News going up just after the vote, to ask why they voted leave. They didn’t go to the art gallery, or to the museum, or to the independent shops; they went to places they knew they would find a certain narrative. But there is no single narrative of a place, is there?”

McMillan remains loyal to his hometown, but the vote did leave him forlorn. “A lot of regeneration was done there with European money, but nobody has made that argument. So while I was sad people voted in the way they did, I wasn’t surprised. They’ve felt ignored by generations of politicians. It’s a collective failure, really.”

His novel, then, is an act of love, in pursuit of reclamation, McMillan saying: write us off at your peril. “I didn’t want my characters to be an archetype, or a cliche. The father, for example, is proud of his son, and will go and see him perform his drag act – even if it might be complicated for him. You know, I left Barnsley for Manchester several years ago, but a lot of my friends are still there, my family too. It is possible to live a really happy queer life in towns like that, and that’s the story I wanted to tell.”

Perhaps the main reason Andrew McMillan felt it possible to become a poet in the first place was because his father is one. Ian McMillan has long been among the nation’s favourite poets, his work accessible, funny, and teeming with pathos, cheek and resonance. McMillan hosts the Radio 3 language and literature cabaret The Verb, and annually presents the TS Eliot Prize readings; alongside Simon Armitage, he is a champion of the poetry scene.

He has also spent much of his career doing as his son would later do, taking poetry into the community, and making it inclusive – an art form for all.

“Dad helped make poetry not feel abstract,” McMillan says, though adds that he didn’t initially have any plans to follow in his footsteps. “God, no! I think that whatever your parents do is embarrassing for you as a teenager, even if they were James Bond. For a long time, I wanted to be a politician, or an actor – certainly not a poet.”

It was only after taking English at A-level that he began gradually to accept, and then embrace, it. It has helped him, he says, “make sense of the world”.

McMillan has always written poetry as autobiography, and each of his collections is intensely personal. Pandemonium, for example, concerned the relationship he was in at the time, which has since ended. “It’s a nice time capsule of our time together, I suppose.” He’s still on friendly terms with his ex, which is just as well as his partner got custody of Patricia, the dog. “I get to have her once a month,” he says, “which is nice because it means we [he and his former partner] still get to be in each other’s lives.”

He’s writing more poetry now, in which the poems focus mostly on the breakup, how he dealt with it, and how he is forging forward. “To me, poetry has always felt like a space in which to chronicle the ongoingness of life. Novels are different, and I would like to try and write another one at some point.”

When I ask him what sort of novel, his answer takes me by surprise. “I want to write about zombies, I think.” Really? He smiles, and nods. “Yes,” he says, “but set in Barnsley.”

‘Pity’ is published by Canongate on 7 February