Darren McGarvey
Monday 17th October 2022
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
It is our great pleasure to be hosting celebrated Glaswegian writer, hip-hop artist, broadcaster and campaigner: Darren McGarvey. Darren comes to discuss The Social Distance Between Us, his follow-up to 2018's Orwell Prize winner, Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass.
Described in The Times as 'an Orwell for today's poor', Darren came to public prominence in Scotland through regular appearances on BBC Scotland, a weekly column in The Scotsman, his contributions to The Independent and The Guardian, and being a familiar face on BBC'S Question Time and Radio Four's Start the Week.
In The Social Distance Between Us, Darren takes aim at the myth of British meritocracy, undermining the rather outdated assumption that cream always rises to the top. In Darren's own words:
Britain is in a long-distance relationship with reality. A ravine cuts through it, partitioning the powerful from the powerless, the vocal from the voiceless, the fortunate from those too often forgotten. This distance dictates how we identify and relate to society's biggest issues - from homelessness and poverty to policing and overrun prisons - ultimately determining how, and whether, we strive to resolve them. So why, for generations, has a select group of people with very limited experience of social inequality been charged with discussing and debating it?
I've sat on cold pavements with beggars, asking them why they would rather wander the streets than live in supported accommodation. I've pleaded with alcoholics to give sobriety one last shot before they end up dead - and read their obituaries in the paper weeks later. I've sat with youth workers at their wits' end as diversionary services are cut amid a surge in gang and knife violence. Too many people remain so far from this nightmarish social reality that even when they would earnestly wish to bring about change, they don't know where to start. So start here.
So come and join us in celebrating one of Scotland's most venerable political writers and activists.