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. It’s a space of ideas, a place in which I feel really happy.” McMillan has been writing poetry since his early twenties. “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 by so many people who just said insulting things about them. It is possible to live a really happy queer life in towns like that, and that’s the story I wanted to tell.” 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. “Dad helped make poetry not feel abstract,” McMillan says, though adds that he didn’t initially have any plans to follow in his footsteps.