Stu Hennigan’s debut novel Keshed is a dark, complex, and visceral exploration of class, belonging, addiction and fatherhood. And yet, in the words of Hennigan himself, Keshed is at its heart “a traditional love story.” Published by the innovative Ortac press, the first print run has, in the two months since its publication, almost sold out. The novel was widely praised critically, heralded in the TLS as “an exceptional first novel […] Original, difficult and revelatory.” I sat down with Stu Hennigan to chat about his writing process, influences, the complexities of writing about class, and the importance of trusting the reader.

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Can you share with us the genesis of Keshed?

It was a slow-burn. About twenty years ago I was working in a petrol station which had a little shop, and  there was a guy who came in, rattling like he had D and T’s, shaking so much he couldn’t talk properly. He’d buy a bottle of the cheapest scotch and a bottle of the cheapest vodka, and a packet of baccy. I’m always attracted to broken down characters so I never forgot him. Anyway, about ten years ago there was a house for sale around the corner from us for next to nothing cause it had been fucking totaled inside, deliberately; everything smashed up. There was a pile of human shit in the middle of the floor in the middle of the kitchen floor and it turned out someone was still living there. Then when I was writing Ghost Signs (Hennigan’s acclaimed non-fiction book about food delivery during Covid), one day the whole story suddenly came to me. The two things came together: the guy and the house and then what had happened. I had the story of Keshed.

What happened from there, once you had the arc? The book is written in third, second, and first-person. How did you proceed? Was your process multi-layered?

Well, I wrote the first draft in three or four days. I just sat and knocked the third-person narrative out. At this point it was just out there, no voice, no style. All exposition, backstory. Then I had that document with the main narrative and started another document with a fractured narrative, where I was writing episodes. The latter, I just wrote whenever I could. Then the main narrative was drafted again for shape, then by draft four I was thinking about voice. People say the book has a raw energy, and I think it comes from the energy and speed of that first draft. By the time I was at the last draft, it contained the first draft, but only five percent. Each draft starts as a copy of the previous one so it’s like genetics, the strands popping from generation to generation.

And how did you put the pieces together? It feels collaged.

I used spreadsheets, and each narrative had a colour, so I could visually see the balance of the book, have an overview. I could also balance out the POV. Because one narrative goes backwards as the other goes forwards. But the strength of the book is also in what’s not said. It was really labour intensive, keeping things back to keep the story paced. The story is what keeps people reading, not the “issues.” Since it’s been published, I get messages every day from people going, “I can’t put it down,” and “Fuck, it’s brilliant, I’m crying in the toilet on the train.”

Keshed deals with many issues: masculinity, addiction, class. I wanted to share with you a quote from Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?:  

“I didn’t want to be in the teeming mass of the working class…. I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape — but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community — to society?”

I feel like in Keshed the main character, Sean, is battling between belonging, history and escaping, and being what in French is called a ‘transfuge de class,’ a class defector.

I think if you grow up like Sean, clever in a rough place, where no one has ever been to Uni, left school before sixteen, you’re a black sheep. You speak, think, behave differently. There’s a huge pressure to conform. Even families don’t know how to deal with it. Then as you get older you realise your roots are important. But it’s interesting what Winterson says about escape. I was once on a panel with Justine Greening, a cabinet minister, and she was talking about social mobility as though we should all aspire to it: changing class, escaping. It should be an option, not a necessity. Everyone should be able to have a reasonable standard of living. But now it’s impossible.

Keshed is  not a social history but much of the book takes place in Northern working-class settings (building sites, working-man’s clubs, pubs), how much did you want to demystify, undo stereotypes?

Well, this is partly my fault cause the word “class” is in the blurb and I wrote it, but I didn’t sit there like Martin Amis or someone and say I’m going to write a book about class! For me Keshed is a traditional love story that doesn’t have a happy ending. But class politics affect people and if you want your characters to be real, the world around them will affect them, the sense of place. Environment shapes people, language and stuff. But I am wary of the publishing-speak about Northern and working-class fiction. They validate that it’s a separate thing. I’m currently judging a New Writing North award for working class writers, and they asked me what I’m looking for. And I said I want to see stuff from writers who don’t define themselves or their work by geography or class. Often these labels become restrictive, they mean you’re only allowed to write about one thing. Stay in your lane.

The actual plot of Keshed could take pace in London or anywhere. It’s a love story everything else hangs off. The last thing that the world needs is another fucking middle-aged white man saying, “I’m writing about masculinity and you know, politics and whatever.” But the book is implicitly political because of the knock-on of how the characters experience the world around them and not the other way round.

Pat Barker, who I love, once said “I got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It’s not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book.”

The last thing that the world needs is another fucking middle-aged white man saying, “I’m writing about masculinity and you know, politics and whatever.”

What are the stereotypes you faced? Or cultural models?

I think in terms of stereotypes you get extremes: The Royle Family (a British sitcom with a comic portrayal of working-class family life in the 1990’s – 2000s) or Ken Loach and films like Raining Stones. Before The Royle Family I’d never seen people on the TV that looked and talked like they do where I’m from. It was dripping with pathos, all that warmth. It’s really funny. But on the other end is Ken Loach, who’s amazing, but his work is polemic so you only get the bad stuff. The actual reality is somewhere in between the two.

I feel like Mike Lee sits between the two.

Yes. And people don’t realize life can be like Ken Loach film and there’s still intense warmth in the relationships, laughter, joy. Keshed is not sentimental but it’s not cynical, it’s not Ken Loach or The Royle Family. I want this to create a well-rounded portrayal of it. I don’t like fiction that’s black and white.

I feel this relates to what you do when you write about addiction. It’s nuanced, the way you deal with addiction. Addiction is almost a character in Keshed. It connects people, Sean with his dad, with his girlfriend’s best friend Poppy.

It’s in the culture. It’s just endemic. It’s a fact of life in the culture I grew up in. Everybody takes drugs. People get fucked as a coping device, or because they’ve got nothing better to do. It’s not necessarily addiction.

Yes, you never use the word “addiction.” But you write so poetically about addiction, the euphoria and the destruction. But also the complexity, the reality of a beer in the morning. You take it outside of class. It makes me think of posh Eaton schoolboys I knew who were addicted to drinking gin and taking coke.

Substance abuse can bond people. But it’s also anhedonia. There’s no glamour. I didn’t want to describe the way someone feels when they’re on drugs. It’s so boring. There’s a sentence in there I spent hours on that describes the feeling of watching the sun come up at a rave without saying it: “E’s necked in those viscous, timeless hours when the world glows like a pearl in the pink velvet light of the ambient dawn.” The language is really important.

Also you use the addict’s inner critic, a voice that occasionally cuts into the main narrative.

Yeah, they fucking hate him. Horrible, horrible, I didn’t put that in early on. I kept thinking about it, I knew it would be a lot of work, that voice could argue with everything.

Keshed is written in short, blistering sentences, uses disconnected language, rhythm, slang, swearing, colloquialisms, vernacular, moves from in time from first through third person, and with that inner voice in italics. How did this voice develop and get onto the page? Those phrases like “wobbling like Bambi on Buckfast,” and “away wi’ youse till ye’ve sobered up ye fucking radge cunt.”

The reason I like writing fiction is because of the possibilities of it, you know. It allows you to be more creative with language and form. There’s a sentence in Keshed that’s two and a half pages long. I spent a lot of time on that, the rhythm, the way it flows. A lot of British fiction today is written in this non-voice, in Estuary English.

The writer Steve Hollyman read Keshed recently and said it’s one of ten best books he’s read. He says the fixed third-person narrative voice takes us closer to the character’s than a first-person voice. It’s Sean’s voice but narrated from the outside. There’s that distance so you can still be creative. I don’t like writing in the first person.

Keshed is 400 pages long but it is such a dynamic read. I think the linguistic rhythm is powerful. As readers we’re carried by words, almost like in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Do you think the fact that you’re a musician has influenced your writing?

No. Even before I could play guitar, I’ve always had this natural rhythm to how I write. I’m hyper-conscious of it when I’m editing. I also used to read and write a lot of poetry. When I’m getting into the final stages of editing, like that huge sentence, I read aloud till I feel the rhythm is right; but it comes from poetry rather than music.

What are your influences?

When I was thirteen I loved reading Steven Wells in NME, got into Bret Easton Ellis and discovered the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Thomas especially was a revelation. I didn’t know you could do this stuff with words. I’ve spent my life trying to find my own way into those three: the vernacular of Wells, the forensic precision of Ellis, and the soft fluidity of Thomas’s poetry. Thirty years later, all three of these things are present in Keshed.

I’ve spent my life trying to find my own way into those three: the vernacular of Wells, the forensic precision of Ellis, and the soft fluidity of Thomas’s poetry.

Reading Keshed, I often thought of Tony Harrison’s infamous poem V, first appeared in the London Review of Books in 1985, exploring class struggle, unemployment, racial tension, deprivation. He has an imaginary debate with a skinhead who says to him:

“So what’s a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can’ I you speak the language that yer mam spoke. Think of ’er! Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek? Go and fuck yerself with cri-de-coeur!“

You have a character saying, “All them bloody books, no good to man nor beast. Young boys need a trade.”  How do you deal with questions about hierarchy and language, those that are considered noble and can enter the literary sphere? Or the plain English campaign where we take all the complexity out?

I think that any language that you want to use is valid if you use it properly. For example, a lot of what’s called “bad language” is class-based and goes back to the Normans when all the aristocracy were speaking French. So our swear words were Anglo-Saxon words. But vernacular, anything can be beautiful, like V. If everyone used Standard English, we’d all still be Henry James doing clause after clause after clause of grammatically perfect but fucking tedious prose.

But the publishing world is beige. Standardised. Above all, I think you’ve got to trust your readers. That’s the thing. Don’t spoon-feed people. It’s like in short stories it’s as much about what you leave out as what you put in. You let the reader read between the lines.

Keshed has been hailed as being about modern masculinity, but I feel like I feel like it’s a book more about a kind of community.

Sometimes I regret putting the world masculinity on the cover because it’s not the main question, but it does deal with it in relation to culture and class rather than gender. It’s an incidental part of the novel because where Sean comes from men fix things and don’t read books. Men don’t paint their nails. That’s the conflict. I joke that I was born in 1980 but I was raised in the 50s. My mom’s 69 and she is maddeningly old-fashioned. She thinks her purpose is to feed the man and look after the kids and clean the house because that’s what women do.

Yet, Keshed is definitely not a male-dominated piece of artistic work. And the female characters in the book are powerfully drawn figures: Mandy, Sean’s mother, Poppy, Haley, even Daisy and Denise. Your book draws heavily on male experience. Tell us more about the experience of writing women.

If you’re a man and you can’t write a believable female character, you probably can’t write the believable male character either. Whatever you’re writing about—you know, a man or a woman or a child, or a dog, or a pixie at the bottom of the garden—you use the same skills and the same techniques to do it. And it’s actually just a question of empathy. But in Keshed the women characters had to be right. The first person that read Keshed was the writer Naomi Booth. I wanted her opinion not just as a brilliant writer but as a woman from the working-class North.

 I wanted to show that the women are in control of everything and no one talks about it. They’re pulling all the strings. Sean thinks he’s ahead of the game, sneaking around, boozing, taking a little line now and again, and yet his girlfriend knows everything.

If everyone used Standard English, we’d all still be Henry James doing clause after clause after clause of grammatically perfect but fucking tedious prose.

On an experimental level, Keshed is incredibly beautiful visually. It uses typography echoing Dadaists, medieval manuscripts, but also concrete poetry. Can you share your influences and how you worked with Ortac to produce such a stunning novel?

It was exciting and evolved from the fractured narrative. I was chatting to James Scudamore really early on and he pointed out that it started with a guy unconscious, and then conscious. And I denotated the text to show that. And the big black was like his unconscious, so fairly early on that was part of it. But when I worked with Henry from Ortac we wanted to develop the monochrome side, and the cover design jumped out because of the mirror side, the duality in the text, the different sides of the character in black and white. Then we began to use the THEN and NOW sections to structure the book and made them black-on-white/white-on-black. The aesthetic is derived from the text.

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Keshed is now available from Ortac Press.

You can read an extract here.

Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet, editor and musician from the North of England. His book about Austerity and the pandemic, Ghost Signs (Bluemoose, 2022) was shortlisted for Best Non-Fiction at the Books Are My Bag Awards and Best Political Book by a Non-Parliamentarian at the Parliamentary Book Awards in 2022/23. His short fiction, essays, poetry, criticism and articles have been published widely in print and online including by Prospect,  3:AM, Tangerine Press, Broken Sleep Books, White Rabbit, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Lune, Visual Verse, Lunate and Expat. His next book, Disappear Here, a social and cultural history of United States from the late sixties to the present day, analysed and interpreted via the thousands of pop-culture references in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, will be published in 2027 by Ortac Press. He also plays guitar in the rock band Kamień. Keshed is his first novel.

Susanna Crossman is an award-winning writer, author of the acclaimed memoir, Home is Where We Start: Growing Up In The Fallout of The Utopian Dream (Penguin, 2024) out with Heliotrope Books, US in 2026. Her new novel, The Orange Notebooks, was published in 2025 (Bluemoose Books, UK and Assembly Press, North America). She has recent work in The Guardian, Vogue, Aeon, The Paris Review, Neue Rundschau and more. A published novelist in France (Éditions Delcourt, LEH), she regularly collaborates with artists on hybrid projects. In 2026 she judged the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize. When she’s not writing, she works on three continents as a mentor, collaborator, lecturer and clinical arts-therapist.