Alan Bennett cites Andrew McMillan's debut as inspiration for his latest play

Andrew McMillan's Playtime explores childhood and early adolescence and the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities.

Alan Bennett praises Andrew McMillan's Playtime in his latest London Review of Books diaries for its depiction of youthful sexuality.

Bennet writes:

“I wish I had written or had the courage to write, particularly the failed encounters – with a man sheltering from the rain in a telephone box or a youth on the train dozing in the seat opposite. Were this Alexandria not Barnsley they might be by Cavafy.”

Bennet, in his diaries, featured in the London Review of Books, also comments that Andrew McMillan's debut, physical, inspired his latest play.

You can read the article in full on The Guardian website here.

Andrew McMillan joined the Manchester Writing School team in September 2017. He was born in South Yorkshire in 1988; his debut collection physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers' award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. Most recently physical has been translated into Norwegian.