Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, I'm very pleased to be joined by Kit DeWile, who has previously put on this podcast

when her excellent first novel, My Name is Leon, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, but she's here now as an editor. Her new book is Common People and Anthology

of Working Class writers. Get welcome. That title from the Pulp Song, did you take that as a kind

of, you know, it's got a sort of pugnacious quality that part. It has, and I think, you know, the way people try and reclaim words that, you know, it's got a sort of pugnacious quality that. It has. And I think, you know,

the way people try and reclaim words that, you know, have previously been used as a term of derision,

we just thought, well, we'll have that and we'll take that and we'll be proud to be common people.

I'm actually too old to have been in the blur pulp era. So I don't remember that song. The song I remember as

common people was some years before with, uh, what's his name? Anyway, an old guy, obviously. So yeah,

I didn't reference that song at all. Everyone else does, but I'm just slightly too old to remember it.

It's an accidental, felicitous. What was the kind of genesis of this book? I mean, what made

you think, A, we need this book and B, you know, what form it should take? So I felt we needed the

book because of when I first came into publishing,

which is only three or four years ago now, I was surprised that there weren't more working

class writers or very obviously more working class writers. Now whenever we have this conversation,

in fact, I think it was Ian Rankin put something on Twitter about that there's

loads and loads of loads of working class writers, but they're writing genre fiction.

They're writing crime. They're writing romance. They're writing on the fringes. They might be

writing graphic novels, for example. But if you're talking about commercial fiction and literary

fiction, there's a definite absence of working class writers.

So I wanted, because I know, because I'm working class, I really wanted to find a vehicle to showcase what working class writers were out there.

And also to give other working class writers like myself an opportunity to be heard,

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