For more than a quarter of a century, David Peace’s novels have chronicled the fractures of civic life in Britain.
His Red Riding Quartet, set between 1974 and 1983, used the Yorkshire Ripper murders as the backdrop for a bleak anatomy of police corruption. GB84, set during the miners’ strike, exposed the darker machinery of Britain’s establishment.
Earlier this week, as Keir Starmer’s government lurched from one scandal to the next and Tommy Robinson drew vast crowds in London, I spoke with Peace. We talked about Yorkshire and London, Labour and the far-right, and why the legacy media struggles to understand the mood of the country.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript — Jacob
Every Dispatch article is rooted in a particular place or community, so let’s start with one close to you: Yorkshire.
Absolutely. I was born in Dewsbury, grew up in Ossett, did A-levels in Wakefield — but since I was 19, I’ve not really lived there. I lived in Istanbul and since 1994 I’ve lived in the east end of Tokyo.
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