Stu Hennigan

Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet, editor and musician from the north of England. His book Ghost Signs (Bluemoose) was shortlisted for two national literary prizes, including Best Political Book By A Non-Parliamentarian at the Parliamentary Book Awards in 2023. His short fiction, essays, poetry and criticism have been featured by Prospect, 3:AM Magazine, Lunate, Lune Journal, Broken Sleep Books, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Massive Overheads, Visual Verse and Expat Lit. His next book, Disappear Here: Bret Easton Ellis’ America, a social and cultural history of America from 1970 to the present day as seen through the lens of Ellis’s novels, will be published by Ortac Press in late 2025. His debut novel Keshed is also going to be published late 2025 by Ortac Press; he also plays guitar in the rock band Kamień.

Stu can be found at:
Bluesky: @stuhennigan.bsky.social.com
Substack: @stuhennigan

Our first interview was back in 2022

Tell me what inspired you to write your book?

I’ve got 2 WIP’s at the moment so I’ll say a bit about both. There’s a novel called Keshed which is sitting with a publisher and a long-form non-fiction project which is out late next year. The genus of the novel was interesting because it grew from something that had been in my mind for years but I’ll explain that one in the next answer. The non-fiction project is called Disappear Here, and it’s a social and cultural history of American since 1970ish, analysed through the prism of Bret Easton Ellis novels. The spark for that was when I was rereading his backlist last year, again, while I was off sick with shingles and waiting for the paperback of The Shards, and I realised he was going to be 60 in March 2024 and that the year after would be forty years since the publication of Less Than Zero. I thought it was time someone looked at his literary legacy objectively rather than so many people’s opinions of him being filtered through the shitstorm over American Psycho, which still, frustratingly, persists after 30 years, when it’s a book that’s often misrepresented and misunderstood, and isn’t at all a marker for what the rest of the backlist is like in many ways.

What came first the characters or the world?

I’d had the opening scene from Keshed in my head for almost as long as I can remember. It was a tableau of this character in a certain space and setting and I’d written the first few pages at least ten times over a number of years, but I could never get past that because I couldn’t figure out what had gone down for him to end up where he was. One day when I was out in the van doing the deliveries that were chronicled in Ghost Signs, without even consciously thinking about it – and bear in mind Ghost Signs didn’t exist as a concrete thing either at that point, although Kev at Bluemoose and I had started speaking about it – I had this flash where all of a sudden I knew why this guy is where he is in that scene. And the whole novel pretty much appeared, more or less fully formed, in the space of five minutes. Obviously when I came to write it there were bits that were added and taken out of what I had in my head that day, but substantially it was there in terms of the plot, story arc and all the rest of it. That’s far from standard though, with long-form fiction it’s different every time in terms of how it’s conceived.

How hard was it to get your book published?

I’m going to caveat this by saying before Ghost Signs I’d given up writing for 15 years because I couldn’t stand all the rejections I had for the novel I was hawking around after uni, cos otherwise people will read what’s coming and just go, “WHAAAAAAAAAT?! Why can’t that happen to me?” but it happened almost by accident. I was making loads of notes while I was doing the deliveries that went into the book, thinking I was actually writing about lockdown, and at the same time I was live-tweeting some of the things I was seeing while everyone else was effectively under house arrest. One day I was telling Kev something that’d happened that day when I was on a really tough estate and this guy was getting a bit heavy and I thought I might have to deck him. Kev said, Are you writing any of this down? And I said, yeah man, I’ve got about fifty thousand words worth of notes. Can I see it? Absolutely not, it’s not even punctuated, it’s like the Kerouac scroll and a Hunter S Thompson speedfreak spew rolled into one. But you can have a look when I’ve decided what to do with it if you want…….And that was it. We started talking about it as I was still doing the work, sussed out a timescale and really it went from there. So it happened organically, it wasn’t a case of me having to sub it or anything like that. I didn’t even know I was writing a book before then, just trying to write down as much as I could for posterity because it was such a mad time, one of those where you know you’re living through something epochal and transformational rather than those labels being imposed retrospectively after the culture has shifted. We just realised there was an opportunity for us to work together to create this document not just of Covid but the ruins of the country in the midst of austerity and it’s credit to Kev for having the foresight to clock it so early on.

How long did it take to write?

Interesting question. I had nine weeks of diaristic accounts that were written almost on the spot but as I said, they weren’t structured or punctuated or anything. I didn’t include this in the book because it wouldn’t have added anything and no one would have believed it anyway because it seems too neat, but the last episode it recounts was an afternoon when I spent about three hours talking a woman with a tumour into getting an ambulance when she was literally screaming in pain like she was being murdered but didn’t want to leave her dog at home. I’d set that evening as the time I was going to start writing up the notes – we’d planned eight weeks of journals so I’d not documented much of the ninth week, but that episode had to go in; I was really shaken when I went home though and decided I’d get pissed instead. But half my brain said, give over, you procrastinating bastard, get on with it. So I sat down with my cider and my laptop and made a start, then I woke up at four a.m. the next day, wrote from half four till half seven, saw the kids, did eight hours on the van, then wrote till midnight, then did it again every day for nine days. I didn’t know this at the time but I have ADHD and that was the hyperfocus kicking in, it wasn’t something I planned to do, not as if I was setting the alarm or anything. I’d rather have been asleep tbh. But that was the first “draft” of a fashion, or the raw material everything was sculpted from. After that I did some editing on it with Heidi James, sent it to Kev, and then it was a case of him saying, can you do x, y, z to the MS, I’d rush off and do it in no time, then it’d take him ages to get back to me cos he’s so busy; then I’d get another list, smash it out, then wait again. After 6 months of that it went to Annie Warren, who edited it, and she was like, this MS is in such good shape we could publish it now; but let’s do some work anyway. This was January 2021 and Covid was still in full swing and Kev didn’t know when to publish it while it was still a ‘live’ story, so he gave us 12 months to work on it but we had it done by September and the MS was with Annie for a lot of that time – we had the luxury of having no pressure in terms of deadlines or anything so it was a really smooth process. It sounds ridiculous to think of now when I look at it, but realistically if you out together to total time it took in terms of the work I did on it and subtract all the time when other people had the MS etc, I reckon it won’t have been much more than six months, if that.

Do you have a writing playlist? If so do you want to share it?

I need silence when I write these days; I don’t even wanna hear people breathing. Obvs that ain’t possible when there’s kids in the house so if they’re awake and up I stick my ear buds in without connecting them to anything and it’s lovely then, just me and my Mac and the words in my head. Bliss.

How many publishers turned you down?

This is fucking unbelievable given what I said about Ghost Signs, but I sold Disappear Here (the Bret Easton Ellis book) without a pitch or a proposal as well. It’s too long a story to go into now and it’ll make unpublished writers despair, if there are any reading, but the tl;dr version is I mentioned in an off-the-cuff catch-up conversation I was having with Henry at Ortac Press that I was working on an essay about Bret as a cultural archivist, it turned out Bret was the writer who got him into reading, so butterfly effect etc there’d be no Ortac without him. I sent him some of my research just because he obviously knew a hell of a lot about it and sounded like he might find my nerdy Excels interesting. So I flipped my wig when he emailed back two weeks later offering a contract, cos I’d only sent it out of interest and that was the last thing I expected to happen. Just to make people feel better though, I’ve had five (I think) rejections for Keshed, all from publishers who said they loved it and gave the most ridiculously flattering feedback, but said it wasn’t quite right for them for whatever reason. Which is fine. Rejection’s all part of the game and small presses have to curate incredibly carefully; at least I’m not being fobbed off with platitudes, although I’m 90% sure I’ve found it somewhere to live now anyway. Watch this space.

What kind of reactions have you had to your book?

Ghost Signs was shortlisted for two major awards, which was mental, and I got to go to the Houses Of Parliament in a room full of Lords, Ladies and MPs wearing a STILL HATE THJATCHER shirt for one of the ceremonies, which was better than winning, which I didn’t anyway. It didn’t get that many press reviews – hardly any, actually, aside from a wonderful one from David Collard in the TLS, one from Anna Coatman for Tribune and a tiny – but amazing – one in a New Statesman roundup. The public response was unbelievable though. I had Professor Lucy Easthope championing it from early on, which was crazy when we first started talking and I looked her up to find she’s an internationally-renowned expert and was one of the advisers whose input the government scrupulously ignored during the pandemic. To have someone like that being so vocal about it, especially the value she placed on how the data was used, was madness, cos I’m not an academic and was basically winging it as I went along, like I do with most things.

What’s the favourite reaction you’ve had to your book?

Someone Tweeted me a photo of Ghost Signs being waved on a picket line during a train strike, that was fucking epic and I wish my grandad had been around to see it; Michael Portillo compared it to Orwell and Engels, which was insane, then tried to tell me the people in the book were all high on drugs and didn’t deserve any help; so I got to stick it to him live on national TV and his reaction to that was pretty special, so much so they cut the interview, pretended the link had gone down and erased me from their YouTube archive. My sister texted me halfway through the interview and said I looked like I was about to burst out laughing, which I was very close to doing to be honest. I’ve had to do a fair few things with politcos since it came out and it’s always fun, especially with those of the conservative persuasion. They think cos I’m a scruffbag and talk like a cross between Sean Bean and Liam Gallagher I’m some sort of yokel; they start off patronising, then switch to trying to baffle you with jargon when that doesn’t work, abut they get the shock of their lives when this northern oik they think they can browbeat and walk all over starts coming back at them like Mick Lynch channelling Mark Fisher! One of the voices in Keshed is quite experimental and I’ve been trialling it as a performance piece at some gigs with Steve Kirby and Industrial Coast Records up in Boro. First time I did that, was reviewed as “Arab Strap meets Barry Hines meets John Cooper Clarke,” which is likely to be the best write-up I’ll ever get. Have to shout out the legendary Memorial Device on Twitter too, who was the first person to read it who’s actually a working class northerner and is steeped in the language and culture I’m trying to recreate on the page. Their entire critique consisted, verbatim, of: “Fucking loved it. Every word fiercely authentic.” Which was more valuable to me than pages of notes, because if they recognise that world and see the truth in it, I’ve done justice to the people I’m writing about and nothing is more important to me than that.

What can you tell us about your next book?

I’ve already talked about Disappear Here, but essentially it’s arguing for Ellis’ back catalogue as a social and cultural history of the US over 50 years. In The History Of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Norman M Klein proposes to use a history of popular culture as an alternative form of literature; I’m inverting that, and using the literature of Ellis as a history of popular culture. Keshed is a novel about class, belonging, masculinity, male mental health, parenthood, relationship breakdown, addiction, and the impossibility of living under the constraints of systems of government you have no wish to engage with but have no option but to avoid. Cheerful shit like that. The next book, Cardboard Cut-Out, which I’d have written by now if Disappear Here hadn’t, um, appeared, is a love letter to my best mate and vocalist in my first band Dave Stodart, who died in 2008. That’s gonna be a novelisation, fiction, small-town Spinal Tap full of excruciating comedy but with some moments of genuine, shit-shaking tragedy, and believe it or not, that silly fat bastard dying on me isn’t even the saddest part.

Do you take notice of online reviews?

Absolutely not. I don’t read Amazon or Goodreads reviews or anything like that – therein lies the path to madness. There’s a great line from Mike Davis where he says (I’m paraphrasing) along the lines of, some writers like to keep their progeny close at hand, others boot them out the door when they’re old enough with orders never to call home. That’s definitely me. Once I’ve finished a piece of any description and it’s out there, it belongs to the public and they’re welcome to it. I’m always well into the next thing by then anyway. Thing I always say to people – you take 100 online reviews of a book that’s won every award going and there’ll be at least one in there saying it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. 100 reviews of the worst book ever will turn up a couple that say it changed their lives. Eye of the beholder an that; you can’t do anything about it. If folk don’t like your work they’re probably not your audience, and if all else fails, just remember what Sid said about the man on the street.

Would you ever consider writing outside your current genre?

I don’t have one. I write fiction by preference, it never occurred to me I’d ever even write a book of non-fiction, never mind publish two of them, it’s still bizarre to me how it’s happened, not that I’m complaining. But I’ve published short fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, stuff that can loosely be called “journalism” too, online and in physical print. I love writing all forms for different reasons but long-form fiction is definitely my happiest hunting ground and I’ve said that all along. Hopefully when Keshed comes out folk will see why I’m so adamant on that score!

What did you do before (or still do) you became a writer?

I’ve worked in libraries for 18 years and my job atm is buying books for all 34 libraries in Leeds, as well as doing literary events and a bunch of other stuff. Before that? I’ve done all sorts, usually minimum wage; worked in a petrol station (that could be a novel, for real), as a gardener/handyman (never has a person been less suited to their job title), shit-shovelling on building sites, moving plasterboards……Long periods on the dole as well when I was losing my shit completely in my early to late twenties and trying to kill myself with drugs and booze.

Which author(s) inspire you?

This is a really difficult question and I’ll apologise in advance cos this is gonna be a long answer. I could give you a list of favourite writers but they’re not always the ones that inspire me, they’re two different propositions. I have a small pantheon of untouchables, whose work is pretty much perfect and are the yardsticks by which I judge everyone else – Denis Johnson, Bret Easton Ellis, James Baldwin, Annie Proulx, Pat Barker, Jean Rhys, Cormac McCarthy. I came to him too late to call him an influence but someone like David Peace is inspiring to me because he managed to become extremely successful despite his early work being coalmine at midnight dark, and not only that but he did it in a northern context and vernacular at a time that predate this new vogue for “northern fiction” whatever the fuck that is, by two and a half decades. When I started working in libraries it was just as the fourth Riding book came out. I don’t read a lot of crime fiction – which was where it was classified at work – so didn’t give it a thought, but I picked one up one day and the first page had SAINT CUNT written across the middle in massive bold letters and I thought, aye aye, this fella’s not fucking about, let’s see what’s going on here then. So I read the first one, caned the rest, then GB84, and I’ve loved him ever since. His new one, Munichs, is a masterpiece, btw, even by his standards. Or someone like Elfriede Jelinek – I once saw her reviewed as “An unbelievably confrontational writer,” and I thought, man, talk about life goals……..She’s as uncomfortable and gnarly as it gets, but amazing every time.

Opposite end of the spectrum is someone like Rebecca Solnit, who covers the most incredible range of topics with apparent ease; and whatever the subject, she offers original ideas, expressed with perfect clarity, in the most gorgeously clean prose imaginable; and yet she’s never verbose, or self-indulgent, which really she could be forgiven for if she was on occasion, with the technical chops she has. The kind of writer – like those above, she’s definitely in the pantheon, as is Peace – who writes sentences that make you shake your head in astonishment, page after page, book after book. Like, how the everloving fuck did you arrange those few words to make them convey that?

Right at the beginning of 2024 I read Birding by Rose Ruane, Spent Light by Lara Pawson and Ava Ana Ada by Ali Millar one after the other and that was inspiring, in that, here’s three very different books by three fabulous writers who’ve all got their own spin on how to write fresh, edgy, engaging fiction that’s devastatingly intelligent and deals with complex modern issues in really inventive ways, but without sacrificing narrative drive, characterisation etc, and it made me take a step back and look at what the fuck I think I’m trying to do with my own fiction, which seemed utterly ordinary in comparison. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just stylistically and thematically the novel I’m on atm is coming from a very different place to all of those, and is set more in various decades past than now. But I thought, shit, should I be doing this? Then, well, no, actually, not this time, cos if that’s how I thought I should be writing, I would be. But I trust my instincts and go with whatever has the strongest pull at any given time. The fact it made me stop to even consider it was wonderful though – there’s nothing worse than complacency. All three are shining examples of what the modern novel can still do in the right hands, and what could be more inspiring than that?!

Which genres do you read yourself?

I find labels reductive and unhelpful so I’ll just say something prosaic and banal about the fact I read any book that I think looks interesting regardless of what label other people want to hang on it – hence why I said I don’t tend to read a lot of what’s generally classed as “crime” fiction but it didn’t stop me picking up David Peace, or the early Ian Rankin stuff when that was around in the 90s. I do read an AWFUL lot of non-fiction though, on any number of subjects.

What is your biggest motivator?

Rage, spite, and making up for the fifteen years I lost when I gave it all up, probably due to a distinct lack of both as far as my attitude to the industry was concerned.

What will always distract you?

I have ADHD so probs not the best question to ask! I am super-focused though when it comes to my work though. My folks are retired now so when they go on holiday, if I can spare the time I go live at theirs for a week and write. Bottom of the moor, little cul-de-sac with three houses, 90 year old neighbours on both sides…..I do 12 hour days as standard then, sometimes more if I have to, without batting an eyelid, and often have to make myself stop.

How much (if any) say do you have in your book covers?

A lot more than I thought with Ghost Signs. The cover’s my favourite thing about it, designed by Fiachra McCarthy; when it came to doing the design I honestly thought I’d be given a choice of three and have to hope my choice tallied with Kev’s…..but he hooked us up, Fiachra asked what I wanted, I tried to explain as best as I could and it didn’t take long at all to arrive at the finished one. Kev had the final call, obvs, but we’d already spoken about how it might look so we were all on the same page. We had the design more or less sorted, then Kev said, how about this but with Gallows Pole green? And that was the end of that one! For Disappear Here, I have a really talented mate who does a lot of pop-art sorta stuff, so I asked him to mock-up a scene from Less Than Zero in a Pettibon style last year just to see what it looked like. Even the roughs were incredible so I’m hoping next year we’ll be able to get him to do that one, but that’s something me and Henry will have a chat about much further down the line.

Were you a big reader as a child?

Fuck yeah. Taught myself to read before I even started school and was so far ahead of my age it was ridiculous. By the time I left primary school in 1991 I’d already read everything Stephen King had published, plus a ton of my grandad’s Jack Higgins, Wilbur Smith, Ed McBain, all that. Was onto Dostoyevsky and Burroughs first/second year in High School, then of course I read American Psycho when I was about 13 and discovered Bret Easton Ellis……that one certainly turned out well didn’t it?!

What were your favourite childhood books?

Truthfully, I can’t answer this, because I was reading adult books so young I can’t remember. I used to get asked this question a lot in schools when I visited them with work – the story I tell is that I remember, vividly, having a book read to me at school when I was about 8, but could never remember the title or the name of the writer, just that it was something to do with the plague and that one of the characters was a shepherd called Clem. Literally 30 years later, on a shelf at work, found it – Children Of Winter by Berlie Doherty. Read it since with both my kids and it’s still brilliant. I read I, Coriander by Sally Gardner with my nine year old daughter earlier this year and that’s a magnificent bit of work, the best and most technically accomplished children’s book I’ve read with my two by a fucking distance. Such rich language, brilliant storytelling, complex and nuanced, and doesn’t patronise or talk down in the way so much children’s writing does these days. Top marks for that and have recommended to anyone who’ll listen, parent or not!

Do you have a favourite bookshop?

If so, which? The Old Pier Bookshop in Morecambe. Looks like a bomb has hit it, and you sometimes get the feeling if you take the wrong book off the wrong shelf the whole place will fall down…..you can see daylight through the walls in places. I used to go two or three times a year and fill the boot of the car up. It’s a treasure trove. Can, and have, spent all day in there more times than I can remember.

How many books are in your own physical TBR pile?

On my research pile I’ve just counted 82. That’s mostly non-fiction, and doesn’t include the ones I still need to buy; or any of the supplementary fiction I need for background/context, OR any of the scores of academic papers I’ve downloaded……. And that’s the work stack!

What is your current or latest read?

Agency Of Fear: opiates and political power in America by Edward J. Epstein. This is a research text, as they all are, and will be for the next nine months at least. Published by Verso, who are amazing, half the stuff on the shelf is by them.

Any books that you’re looking forward to in the next 12 months?

Going to use this as an op to say everyone brace themselves for Naomi Booth’s new one, out in March. She’s always been a quality writer but this still feels like a big step forward and I think now she’s with Corsair if they market it right it could be massive. I’ve had a sneak peek at the cover and the fella who wrote Ghost Signs calls it “A brooding and bruising psychodrama about the anxieties of 21st century motherhood that links the primal potency of the female body with the northern landscape’s elemental power.” Dunno what that fella is, but I’m not gonna argue with him.

Any plans or projects in the near future you can tell us about?

Well, hopefully once Disappear Here is done I can get Keshed out there after some proper tightening and polishing, then start work on Cardboard Cut-Out. I’ve a set of short stories sketched too. If I didn’t have to work, I’m not kidding, I could write probably full-time for about five years without ever needing to get another idea with all the various things I have that I’d like to do. And I get new ideas all the time.

Any events in the near future?

None related to my own work but I’m interviewing Sam Mills about her new book on bisexuality in February at Blackwells in Manchester, and I’ve got the dream line-up of Naomi Booth, Lara Pawson and Rose Ruane for an International Women’s Day event at work in March. Hoping to do some stuff – in and out of work – with Robin Ince next year, and there’ll be plenty of gigs with my band all being well too.