AUTHOR’S NOTE

Oxblood takes place in a Manchester, England, of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. I have tried not to engage in the moralising or the sanitising of this history. I wished to grant fictional and forgotten lives freedom to speak wrong, think wrong, act wrong, love wrong and live true. I hoped to resist the softening, denying or excusing of once-pervasive casual bigotries that make a normative present feel better about its past self. Who benefits most from the erasure of language or attitudes in these historical contexts? Who is most comforted, most absolved, by their dishonest omissions? Oxblood may be set in the past, but it is not purely about the past. It was written in and for the present, by a Mancunian mongrel whose white father and black mother remind him that this is not ancient but living history. It is how we got here. It is why we are still here. It can show us how we might get somewhere else, as long as we are honest about it, and refuse to forget. But that’s enough historical moralising and sanitising from me.