Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class — ed. Nathan Connolly

In July 2016, a little over a month after the Brexit vote, Nikesh Shukla, the man behind The Good Immigrant, tweeted:

Someone should do a Good Immigrant-style state of the nation book of essays by writers from working class backgrounds.

Our immediate reply was:

We would publish the crap out of that.

Well, here we are – Know Your Place is that book. In the year it has taken us to collect these essays the book seems to be needed now more than ever.

Know Your Place Is a collection of essays about the working class, written by the working class. We had an open call for writers to submit essays on the lived experience of being working class in the UK today. We were overwhelmed with interest from people wanting to contribute to the book and aimed to choose twenty essays for the final book. In the end we finally managed to whittle it down to twenty-two essays that we felt were not only brilliantly written, but offered unique and fascinating views on working class life. The final contributors are:

· Abondance Matanda – The First Galleries I Knew Were Black Homes

· Andrew McMillan – One of Us: Some Thoughts on Sexuality and the Working Class

· Catherine O’Flynn – Heroes

· Gena-mour Barrett – Living on an Estate Gave me a Community I Never Knew I Needed

· Rebecca Winson – Disguised Malicious Murder: The Working Class and Mental Health

· Sam Mills – The Benefits Cut

· Sylvia Arthur – My Jobs, My Lives

· Wally Jiagoo – Glass Windows and Glass Ceilings

· Kate Fox – The Wrong Frequency

· Yvonne Singh – More Than Just a Dream Land: Why the British Seaside Means So Much to the Working Class

· Lee Rourke – Forging a Path

· Laura Waddell – The Pleasure Button: Low Income Food Inequality

· Kit De Waal – What Happened to Working Class Writers?

· Alexandros Plasatis – The Immigrant of Narborough Road

· Ben Gwalchmai – Where There’s Shit, There’s Gold

· Cath Bore – The Housework Issue (The Other One)

· Dominic Grace – The Death of a Pub

· Sian Norris – Growing Up Outside Class

· Peter Sutton – Education, Education, Education

· Rym Kechacha – What Colour is a Chameleon?

· Durre Shahwar – Navigating Space

· Kath McKay – Reclaiming the Vulgar