Andrew Hankinson – författare

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.A letter arrives. You’ve got an appointment with a trainee clinical psychologist on April 29, 2008.You don’t attend.Another letter arrives. It says they don’t normally reschedule appointments, but they know this is hard for you, so they’re offering you another appointment. It’s on May 13, 2008.You don’t attend.Two years later you shoot three people and shoot yourself. You will be called a monster. You will be called evil. The prime minister, David Cameron, will stand up in Parliament and say you were a callous murderer, end of story. You have nine days and your whole life to prove you are more than a callous murderer.Go.Raoul Moat became notorious one hot July week when, after killing his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, shooting her in the stomach, and blinding a policeman, he disappeared into the woods of Northumberland, evading discovery for seven days. Eventually, cornered by the police, Moat shot himself. Here, Andrew Hankinson re-tells Moat's story using Moat’s words, and those of the state services which engaged with him, bringing the reader disarmingly close, at all times, to the mind of Moat.

This is a book about three things:1. A room called the Comedy Cellar.2. Who gets to speak in that room.3. What they get to say.The Comedy Cellar is a tiny basement club in New York’s Greenwich Village. Run according to the principles of its owners, the Dworman family, it became a safe place for stand-ups to take risks and experiment. Superstar comedians such as Amy Schumer, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, and Louis CK became regulars, celebrities started to hang out, the club hosted debates, and everyone was encouraged to argue at its back table. Then the Comedy Cellar ended up on the frontline of the global culture war.Andrew Hankinson speaks to the Cellar’s owner, comedians, and audience members, using interviews, emails, podcasts, letters, text messages, and previously private documents to create a conversation about who gets to speak and what they get to say, and why. Moving backwards in time from Louis CK’s downfall to when Manny Dworman used to host folk singers including Bob Dylan, this is about a comedy club, but it’s also about the widening cultural chasm.

This is the story of a crime that reverberated around the world. The victim is a tree.For more than a century, the tree at Sycamore Gap stood along Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. Planted in the nineteenth century, it became an iconic local landmark. It was immortalised in the 1991 film Robin Hood starring Kevin Costner, which transformed it into a symbol of the North East. One night in September 2023, two men – Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers – cut it down, prompting a manhunt and trial that played out through global headlines and an ensuing huge media outcry that took on a whole life of its own.Felled is about who these men are, why they cut this particular tree down and why the world felt so strongly about it. It is a portrait of two men who existed in the cracks; men who perhaps did not have the chance to compete on a level playing field; and how society was quick to condemn them when they were charged with felling the tree. It is a story about collective grief and outrage and of what we prioritise in our stories of loss and punishment. It examines the wider reaction to the felling by the British public and asks, concurrently, whether society – all of us – did enough to give these two men hope.Andrew Hankinson is an award-winning writer and the author of You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], which won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and was recently used for a production at the Royal Court, with Andrew as artistic adviser. His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, The Sunday Times, FT, the Guardian, the Telegraph, GQ, Esquire, the Spectator and Wired. He was the only journalist to attend every day of the trial and sentencing of Graham and Carruthers.