Liz Hyder: 'It’s extraordinary exploitation - kids are still working in mines'
Liz Hyder had written six books, none of them published, when bad weather drove her to visit a mine while in north Wales on holiday. Struck and horrified to learn about 19th-century child miners, she came up with the idea for her seventh book: Bearmouth, a young adult dystopia set in a deep mine where her protagonist Newt has worked and lived since the age of four.
Already the winner of the Waterstones children’s book prize for older readers, the book has just won Hyder the Branford Boase award, which goes to the author and editor of an outstanding debut children’s book, won in the past by Meg Rosoff, Mal Peet and Frances Hardinge, among others. Judges called Bearmouth a “hugely brave and impressive piece of writing” and a “book that sends shivers down the spine, truly astounding”.
Related: Bearmouth by Liz Hyder review – a captivating YA debut
“We were on holiday and the weather was terrible, so we went down the Llanfair Slate Caverns,” says Hyder, speaking after her latest win. “It’s an extraordinary place, it’s really atmospheric.”
She learned of how boys starting work would have their right nostril slit on their first day with a piece of slate, to show they were “man enough” to work the mines. She saw a stretcher, “basically a coffin without a lid”, for carrying out injured workers. She squinted at the vague figure of a man in the rock, now barely visible, that workers used to doff their caps to. And the book started to come to her.
After a year of reading the horrific stories of the very young children who were sent down mines, this time in England, she wrote Bearmouth in four weeks. In her dystopia, children are sent down the mines as young as four, and live and work there, sending money to their families on the surface, hoping “the Mayker” will reward them in the next life.
Told in Newt’s distinctive voice – a fictional dialect drawing on regional vocabularies from around the UK – the book sees Hyder’s characters go to some very dark places.
“I ent seen Ma an the rest since I cayme here. Maykers Day ent long enuff to get there an back after prayers and the lyke. An I only has that one day a week,” says Newt, Hyder’s young protagonist and narrator. “So I stays here. Tis cheeper in the dark. I ent seen daylyte since I was fore. Not shore how long ago that were in all trooth but it feels a long time since.”
Hyder, who also works as a PR consultant, says: “It’s the seventh book I’ve written, and the first to get published. I don’t feel any of the books before it are worth revisiting – the gap between the one before and Bearmouth is massive. I just thought, you know what? I’m never going to get published, so I’m just going to write absolutely what I want to write. I wrote it completely from the heart. I cried quite a lot when I wrote it. It was very intense.”
She had left the mine feeling “so angry and upset about it, the brutality of it, the rawness. It is awful. It’s real, extraordinary exploitation, and it’s a fact that kids are still working in mines now around the world. It’s not gone away.”
Hyder read firsthand accounts that had been collected from children working down mines, some of whom had been injured. “You can’t read too much of it in any one go because it is just so shocking and it’s so upsetting,” she says. “I live in Shropshire now and here there are accounts of children aged two or three being killed in the mines. Every time I say it, it just breaks me.”
She says she wanted to try to give those children a voice, because children who worked in the mines didn’t have one. When she had finished, she felt it was “such an odd book” that no one would publish it.
“I think it is a Marmite book. It makes you work hard. You can’t just sit and flick through it. You have to concentrate on the language and concentrate on reading it,” she says.
But she found an agent, and a publisher, with editor Sarah Odedina of Pushkin Children’s Books pouncing on the dark, atmospheric page-turner. “What marks Liz out for me is her courage and originality and her faultless ability to create a story that holds the reader’s attention by its sheer power,” says Odedina, who shares the Branford Boase award with her author.
“I hope it encourages other people to take more risks in terms of what they write and also what is published, because it is an unusual book,” says Hyder.
• Bearmouth by Liz Hyder is published by Pushkin Children’s Books. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.
