Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’ is one of the great English poems of the 20th century: a blistering, fearless epic that he wrote after finding graffiti on his parents’ gravestone in Holbeck Cemetery, on the southern edge of Leeds.

Harrison, who was born in Beeston, considers industrial decline, class war, rampant xenophobia, inadequate political solutions, football and family, savagely confronting his own social mobility in the process. The poem owes much of its fame to a controversial unabridged broadcast on Channel 4 (despite Mary Whitehouse, the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party’s best efforts).

To mark the 40th anniversary of its first publication in their pages, the London Review of Books approached Slung Low, with Tony Harrison’s encouragement, about bringing the poem home to Holbeck Cemetery for a live reading.

Harrison died on 26 September; after discussion with Harrison’s family and longstanding collaborators, some of whom are involved in this project, the event will continue as planned, as a unique and fitting celebration of Harrison’s most famous work.

We invite you to experience ‘v.’ through headphones in the very place that inspired it, ‘on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds’ – re-rooting it in both the seething past and anxious present, and rediscovering the beauty, strength and hope at its heart.

This reading of v. A Homecoming will be BSL interpreted.

Estimated running time: 35 minutes.

The 12noon and 2.30pm readings will take place outdoors at Holbeck Cemetery, LS11 8SY.

You pay what you decide at the end on the event.

The reading is unabridged, and therefore contains the highly offensive racial slurs that Harrison found graffitied in the cemetery, and adult language throughout.