Ben Myers considers the lop-sided geography of northern novels and drama - West Yorkshire with standing room-only for writers while Durham and even the Lake District trail far behind...
Living in West Yorkshire it's easy to get a false impression of how The North – those capital letters are deliberate – is represented in literature. Within a ten mile radius I'm reminded of the enduring legacy of the Bronte sisters, the work of Sylvia Plath who is buried nearby or the omnipresent Ted Hughes, whose stanzas seems to document every footpath or landmark I come across.
Down the road there's Simon Armitage and over in Ossett (via Japan) David Peace. There are the region's dramatists - J.B.Priestley, Alan Bennett, Andrea Dunbar - the generation of realist writers that included John Braine, Keith Waterhouse, Stan Barstow and David Storey and contemporary scribes ranging from Jeremy Dyson to Joanne Harris and recent Not The Booker winner Michael Stewart. That's just one county.
