Martin Hayes was born in London in 1966 and has lived in the Edgware Road area all of his life. He played schoolboy football for Arsenal and Orient, and cricket for Middlesex Colts. Asked to leave school when he was 15, he has worked as a leaflet distributor, accounts clerk, courier, telephonist, recruitment manager and a control room supervisor. His other books are Letting Loose the Hounds (2001), When We Were Almost Like Men (2015) and The Things Our Hands Once Stood For (2018).
Martin Hayes’ latest collection explores with anger the way we live and work in the twenty-first century. It’s a book about austerity – long shifts, sick-days, lay-offs, computer systems crashing and the joy of Friday afternoons. He rages against an economic system that has many of us making money for other people and “has us in its mouth and is shaking us about in its teeth”.
Come along to the Vittle and Swig for an 8 o’clock start. There will be an Open Mic before Martin’s reading, so let’s hear what you’ve been writing about. Then get some inspiration from a powerful and exciting visiting poet.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 