Join Jack Chadwick as he speaks about rediscovering Caliban Shrieks, Jack Hilton’s semi-autobiographical account of northern, working-class life at the turn of the 20^th century.

Hilton, born in Oldham (Lancashire) in 1900, served in the army during the First World War before experiencing a period of homelessness in which he worked odd jobs and became involved in the Rochdale’s Worker’s rights movement. His rallying speeches led to a court-order banning him from further speechwriting, and so Hilton turned to prose writing as an outlet, using stints on the dole to hone his immense literary gift and produce Caliban Shrieks. A chance encounter with an editor in 1934 paved the way for Hilton’s short, but dramatic, writing career that included the publication of five books and greatly influenced the course of political writing in British literature. In 1950, Hilton, disillusioned with the publishing world, retired from writing and returned to his first trade, plastering.

Chadwick, who will be in conversation with Ian Patterson, stumbled across one of the remaining first editions of Caliban Shrieks in Salford’s Working Class Movement Library in 2022 and went on a mission to find out who Hilton was and why his name and work had fallen into obscurity. As a result of his detective work Caliban Shrieks will be brought back into print by Vintage in March 2024.

Jack Chadwick is a writer and journalist based in Colombia. Before writing, he was a barman in Manchester during which time he discovered the lost classic of English working-class literature Caliban Shrieks. Jack is currently working to reveal another hidden masterpiece: the autobiography of a former Colombian paramilitary

Ian Patterson is a poet, translator, and retired academic. He has written extensively on the culture and politics of the 1930s, including Guernica and Total War. His last translation was Finding Time Again, the final volume of the new Penguin edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. His Collected Poems will be published shortly by Broken Sleep Books. He lives in Suffolk.

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