A Kestrel For A Knave

Hines was a celebrated English author and playwright and one of the most prominent figures in British Social Realism, a literary, theatrical, and cinematic movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was born and spent his early life in the Hoyland Common, a mining village in Yorkshire. Upon graduating from Loughborough College, he took a job in a comprehensive school in Barnsley. Here, he would write his novels in the school library after the children had gone home.

These experiences had a major impact on his art, which would mainly be concerned with the lives of working-class miners and those stuck in the neglect and poverty of mining villages in the North of England, particularly the communities surrounding the Yorkshire coal industry. He wrote dialogue in the vernacular of Barnsley, where much of his work is set, and went into great detail when describing the natural world of the countryside that surrounded mining towns.

This ties heavily into British Social Realism, a mid-20th-century movement drawing from the longer tradition of social realism in art and literature. Broadly, Social Realism focuses on realistically portraying the lives and struggles of ordinary people, with specific focus on social issues and economic struggles affecting the working class.