Philip Lee

Danger! Handmade prose and verse. Not commissioned, focus grouped, or sent back with demands from sponsors. The output of a single, warped mind. Don't read it on the train if you're prone to loud guffaws, groans or occasionally sobs. You have been warned.

I was born in Liverpool, in what used to be the United Kingdom. We'll have to see how that particular union pans out; but since Brexit, who knows what the future will be? I've lived in the Republic of Turkey for most of the past three decades, and I've also spent a fair bit of time in Greece and Saudi Arabia. I guess I'd rather be a citizen of the world, but I do love all of the places I've been to. Liverpool can be magical, and I'm grateful to my great grandparents who moved there in the middle of the nineteenth century. It must have been a blast in those days. Turkey's been amazing, the way the country has grown before my very eyes. I guess the Pool must have been like that back then.

I think the writing I do should stand on its own. There are plenty of examples on my blog, downwritefiction.blogspot.com – including a long excerpt from the novel My Heart Forgets To Beat. But I will say this much...

MHFTB took me almost twenty years to write, and is dedicated to the memory of Sean Redmond, who was my mum's cousin. He volunteered for the International Brigade when the Spanish Civil War started, and was killed at Jarama. However, it's not his story, which was a tragedy. It's a picaresque romance, and – fgs – a bildungsroman. It explores why a working class man with a job and good prospects would go out and fight the fascists. Crucially, I wanted to avoid drawing too much on Orwell's book, Homage to Catalonia. Most volunteers simply didn't have his Eton education to help them. I watched Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom after I'd finally finished writing, and I was relieved. The working class experience was generally quite different from Orwell's. What mars Loach's film is how he superimposes the one over the other. That's not to say the film isn't worthwhile, because of the poet Laurie Lee (no relation of mine) and his experience in the Spanish war. Oddly, I think the film might have been truer to life to if its “hero” had come from a sleepy Somerset village, rather than the political dynamite that was - and is - Liverpool.