David Yeats (MA Creative Writing, 2018)

I worked mainly in bookshops and as a technician and publicist in the performing arts before I came to study writing at Birmingham as a mature student. I was taught by Professor Luke Kennard, who led me to areas of literature which have greatly inspired me, and whose novel Black Bag is shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

My first book, The Opal Causeway, is a coming-of-age novel set in the 1970s, embracing historical, environmental, racial, social and sexual themes still so relevant today. As he explores his sexuality, Pete, a gay photographer, experiences the cruelties and injustices of a world completely at odds with the tenets instilled in him during childhood. The Opal Causeway is stocked by libraries on three continents: Australia, the USA and France.

My new book, Unlimited Tenacity, meets Pete again in the early 1990s as the world stands on the threshold between analogue and digital. Three voices from different generations are on a quest for change. Pete guides 20-year-old Little Zinny, as she confronts the trauma of a failed search for her father and her lost sense of self. Reading the diaries of her namesake, Zinny, she begins the journey of healing.

I am now living back by the sea in East Kent which I left when I was 20.