Mark Hyatt

Mark Hyatt was born in South London and lived at the fringes of the bohemian underground in 1960s Britain. His writing was rarely published in his lifetime and survived thanks to friends who saved his manuscripts, made copies of his papers, and kept his poems in circulation. 

Hyatt’s poems appear in the anthologies Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Penguin Books, 1969) and Not Love Alone: A Modern Gay Anthology (GMP Publishers, 1985). His only known novel, Love, Leda (Peninsula Press), is considered an important document of queer, working-class life and a portrait of 1960s Soho in London. The novel was completed in 1965 but remained unpublished until 2023. So Much For Life, a collection of Hyatt’s poems coedited by Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, was published by Nightboat Books in 2023. In an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, Roberts observed.

It’s likely that Love, Leda, which was written prior to the Sexual Offences Act 1967, remained unpublished due to its queer sexual content. The book’s centre of gravity rests somewhere between Dean Street in Soho, the Hyde Park underpass and the derelict lots of the Bayswater Road. It includes depictions of cruising, anonymous sex, a trip to the baths, rapture: “We kiss like ladies. We kiss like lords … I bite him with kind violence. He bites me back.”

In recent years, there has been renewed attention to Hyatt’s work. His mother, who was Romani, died when he was five years old, and his father was a street merchant. Hyatt had either little or no formal education. He met the poet Cressida Lindsay at a gay club in Soho, and he soon moved into her home, a large dilapidated mansion in Notting Hill. 

Lindsay was the daughter of the writer Philip Lindsay and the model Jeanne Ellis, and Hyatt was surrounded by artists, writers, and actors during this time. Lindsay taught Hyatt how to read and write, and the two went on to have a child together in 1961. At one point, Hyatt lived in a ménage à trois with Lindsay and Anthony Blond, who also had a son with Lindsay. 

In 1965, Lindsay moved to Norfolk with her children to set up a commune. Poems and references in Hyatt’s papers suggest that he received electroconvulsive therapy in London and possibly psychiatric treatment in London and Leeds around this time. By 1969, Hyatt had settled with his lover, Donald Haworth, known as “Atom,” in a cottage in Belthorn, near Blackburn. During this time, Hyatt wrote hundreds of poems and worked in a carpet factory. In 1972, Atom left their relationship. Hyatt died by suicide in a cave in rural Lancashire that same year.

No collections of Hyatt’s poetry were published during his lifetime. After his death, small presses released chapbooks of his work, including A Different Mercy (Infernal Methods, 1976) and How Odd (Blacksuede Boot Press, 1973). Other friends who had also held onto Hyatt’s work, including Lucy O’Shea, who had helped prepare the manuscript of Love, Leda for publication during the 1960s, and the poet J.H. Prynne, who made copies of Hyatt’s personal papers, provided much of his work available today.