Bookends is delighted to welcome Cumbrian writer Shaun Wilson, who will be talking about his debut novel Malc’s Boy, a compelling and fearless portrayal of working-class life in Wigton, based on the author’s own experiences.
Malc’s Boy charts a son’s struggle and friendship with his father amidst a legacy of toxic masculinity and violence. Shaun grows up in Wigton as the son of Malc, a prominent publican with a fearsome reputation. More concerned with establishing himself as an artist than making a name for himself in the town’s hierarchical pub scene, Shaun rebels against his father’s expectations. But when Malc is attacked by an old enemy, Shaun is forced to confront his father’s past and escape the life he’s been expected to lead. Malc’s Boy effectively uses Cumbrian dialect throughout and is experimental in form and structure.
Malc’s Boy is also the first novel from Conduit Books, a new small press dedicated to initially publishing male authors, with a focus on fatherhood, working-class male narratives and negotiating 21st-century
relationships as a man.
Shaun Wilson was born in 1980 and raised in Wigton, Cumbria. In 2021, an early draft of Malc’s Boy won a Northern Writers’ Award, with an excerpt published by Granta in 2024. His work featured in Kit de Waal’s working-class anthology Common People, leading the acclaimed Kerry Hudson to tip him for ‘big things’ in the Observer. He holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Northumbria University and has worked as a Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Universities of Northumbria and Teesside.
‘A stunning, hilarious depiction of northern working-class violent masculinity conveyed – in a skewed way – through the form of experimental literary fiction.’ Chris Kraus, bestselling author of I Love Dick
‘Original, fierce, funny, poignant and real… He refuses to surrender his masculinity or to stand outside of it in a book about masculinity, which is exactly what is called for, in art.’
David Keenan, Gordon Burn Prize winning author of For the Good Times