The Gamekeeper + Intro

Join The Showroom and And Other Stories for an evening celebrating the influential South Yorkshire-born novelist and screenwriter, Barry Hines, and the reissue of his masterpiece of nature writing and rural class conflict, The Gamekeeper.

Born into a mining family in a village near Barnsley, Barry Hines (1939-2016) worked first in a coal mine before going to college, working as a teacher, and then becoming a full-time writer of fiction and screenplays for film and television. Hines is best known for A Kestrel for a Knave, a novel that has never been out of print in Britain and was filmed by Ken Loach as the widely acclaimed Kes. For over forty years he documented working-class lives with a boundless humanity, deep empathy, and ultimately, hope.

Sheffield-based publisher AOS are proud to be reissuing a selection of Hines’ novels over the coming years, including classics, lesser-known gems and until-now undiscovered work. This April, AOS published The Gamekeeper, Hines’ gripping novel of rural working-class life through the changing seasons, seen through the eyes of a gamekeeper on a country estate in the North of England. To mark its publication, join us for a screening of the rarely-seen film adaptation of The Gamekeeper, adapted by Hines and directed by Ken Loach. There will also be a series of short talks on Barry Hines’ work and legacy from those that he influenced and that knew and worked with him.

There will be an introduction before this screening.

David Forrest is Professor of Film and Television and Studies at the University of Sheffield. His most recent book is New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema (2020), and with Sue Vice he is the co-author of Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond (2017).

Ron Roseis a playwright and scriptwriter, born in Sheffield and lives in Doncaster. He’s had over 70 plays performed professionally at theatres across the country including two verbatim dramas set in the '84/'85 Miners' Strike Never the Same Again and The Enemy Within; the WW2 mining strikes drama Bread and Roses; and the much-performed Ladies Darts drama Double Top. He’s written television scripts for Between the Lines, The Bill, Heartbeat, the political series Love and Reason, and many others.

Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield where she teaches contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies. Her publications include the BFI Modern Film Classics volume on Shoah (2011), Textual Deceptions: Literary Hoaxes and False Memoirs in the Contemporary Era (2014), the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013) with Jenni Adams, and Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond, with David Forrest (2017). Her latest book is Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ Outtakes: Holocaust Rescue and Resistance (2021).