Overview

Newly discovered in the author's archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst. Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession--one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London's Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

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9781643622453

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Reviews

"""Hyatt suggests that sexuality of any kind is a longing for relation and a way of knowing the self. But so is writing, so is poetry, and so is any kind of social activity. For Hyatt, queer sexuality is a given, not, to adopt the language of the day, a 'social problem.' And in the bohemian enclaves of early 1960s London, he found a context in which his queerness--which along with his race and class sometimes rendered him precarious--could be nurtured and protected. --David Grundy, Harriet Books ""[a] feverish, persistent voice."" --Oluwaseun Olayiwola, TLS ""2023 has been the year of Mark Hyatt: the posthumous publication of Love, Leda (Peninsula) and So Much for Life (eds. Sam Larkin & Luke Roberts, Nightboat) have changed UK and queer literature forever."" --So Mayer, Lunate ""[Hyatt's] story is incredible, his poetry - standing aside from his biography, but as ever and not, informed by it - is so contemporary, so hilarious, so stark, it is hard to believe he was writing in the 60s. . . I could quote him endlessly, and I am grateful to the editors for bringing these poems properly into print."" --Rachael Allen, Granta ""Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound - a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines."" --Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar ""In this amazing novel, Mark Hyatt records with wonder the excited anguish of the very young. His tale of unrequited love, loneliness of the flesh, and life on the margins owes something to the curdled realism of mid-century England, and something to the existential riffing of the Nouveau Roman. Hyatt writes without prudery--his sex scenes are startling in their immediacy. In the end, Love, Leda is a poet's novel with its far-flung lyricism and its surprises of precision and revelation."" --Robert Gl�ck, author of Margery Kempe ""Love, Leda is a transgressive, wriggling slice of queer, working class life in 1960s London. Hyatt is an important literary parent to everyone writing queer London, dreaming of lives free of drudgery and asking what the point of living is."" --Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things ""An unearthed treasure of its time, Mark Hyatt's compelling and emotive novel Love, Leda recounts a whirlwind of intimacies and embodiment, philosophy and humour, in a daring depiction of queer desire, impulse and need, laced through a context of disconnection. With an intensity of life-in-motion, a lyric of spirit and survival in pursuit of the existential, Hyatt vividly conjures his protagonist's navigation of an era's incipient edges. An absorbing, melancholy odyssey of love both transactional and yearned-for, the publication of Love, Leda honours a unique literary voice rediscovered."" --Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic"

Author Information

Mark Hyatt was born in South London in 1940. In recent years, there has been renewed attention to Hyatt's work. His appearance in the influential anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969) led to a growing reputation among the poets of the so-called British Poetry Revival. Hyatt killed himself in 1972, leaving behind almost 2000 pages of manuscript material. In the years following his death, his work was published in three chapbooks and circulated among a small but devoted group of readers. His was posthumously included in the ground-breaking Not Love Alone: A Modern Gay Anthology (1985). His only known novel, Love, Leda (Peninsula Press 2023, Nightboat Books 2024) is considered an important document of queer, working-class life and a portrait of 1960s Soho in London. So Much For Life, a collection of Hyatt's poems coedited by Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, was published by Nightboat Books in 2023.

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