Love, Leda

Mark Hyatt was born in South London in 1940, and died by suicide outside Blackburn in 1972. His selected poems, So Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). Hyatt received little or no formal education, and learned to read and write as an adult. Love, Leda (c. 1965) is his only known novel.

'Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound - a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines.' - Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar; 'Love Leda is a transgressive, wriggling slice of queer, working class life in 1960s London. Hyatt is an important literary parent to everyone writing queer London, dreaming of lives free of drudgery and asking what the point of living is.' - Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things; 'An unearthed treasure of its time, Mark Hyatt's compelling and emotive novel Love, Leda recounts a whirlwind of intimacies and embodiment, philosophy and humour, in a daring depiction of queer desire, impulse and need, laced through a context of disconnection. With an intensity of life-in-motion, a lyric of spirit and survival in pursuit of the existential, Hyatt vividly conjures his protagonist's navigation of an era's incipient edges. An absorbing, melancholy odyssey of love both transactional and yearned-for, the publication of Love, Leda honours a unique literary voice rediscovered.' - Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic