D H Yeats

About D H YEATS 

Born and brought up in East Kent, in many ways D H Yeats was employed in the gig economy before that phrase ever became contemporaneous. He has worked as a teacher, fruit picker, on ferries, in hotels and restaurants, as a bookseller, un correcteur anglais, a technician and publicist in the performing arts, a researcher for environmental projects, a charity worker and latterly an exams’ invigilator.

On leaving school he attended Folkestone College of Art before moving to Wellington, Shropshire, where, together with his sister Jenny Smith, he opened a bookshop. Wishing to learn more about the book trade, he relocated to London where he was employed by Dillon’s University Bookshop for a number of years. Then followed two years in France after which he returned to London to work as a technician in West End Theatre.

In the mid-1980s he studied for a B.A. in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies after which he returned to Performing Arts where he worked for fringe organisations and productions in the field of press, marketing and production.

He has also undertaken voluntary work with Wandsworth Friends of the Earth, OXFAM and the Terrence Higgins Trust.

D H Yeats started seriously writing in 2004. His novel The Opal Causeway is the part of a trilogy; the other two (unpublished) books are Tales from the Opal Shores, a collection of 15 short integrated stories spanning from 1935 to 1965, and a novel of 82,000 words, set around the time of the opening of the Channel Tunnel, called Zinny and Little Zinny taking place in London and Paris and between and beyond. While The Opal Causeway is linear and structured into third parts, the first part taking place over three weeks, the second three months and the third three years, Zinny and Little Zinny has three different strands of narrative from three generations, flitting across the years through dreams, diary entries and backstory.  Each of the Tales take place either side of the Straits of Dover, as far as London and Paris, against a backdrop of momentous events happening in the wider world.

Over the last two years D H Yeats has been working on Drifting Aimlessly Through Lockdown. Around 70,000 words long, this work is structured into three different parts and influenced by dreams (some enhanced in the waking hours!), memories, observations, daily news items and his tinnitus. This work is published as a blog on: https://wordpress.com/posts/driftingaimlesslythroughlockdown.uk 

It is also getting numerous views on https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-yeats-913427142/ 

His short story ‘Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! was published in Fusion: 21 Stories from the Complete Creative Writing Course, ed. Maggie Hamand, (2015). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fusion-Stories-Complete-Creative-Writing/dp/0957694474