D H Yeats

Now living back in East Kent, having left at the age of 20, 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 de la langue anglaise, 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. In 2018 he was awarded a MA in Creative Writing fom the University of Birmingham

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. Published in 2022, his novel The Opal Causeway is the part of a trilogy; the other two books being Tales from the Opal Shores, a collection of 15 short integrated stories spanning from 1935 to 1965 (as yet unpublished), and a novel of 82,000 words, set around the time of the opening of the Channel Tunnel, called Unlimited Tenacity which will be published in October 2026.

While The Opal Causeway is linear and structured into three parts, the first part taking place over three weeks, the second three months and the third three years, Unlimited Tenacity 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 Strait of Dover, as far as London and Paris, against a backdrop of momentous events happening in the wider world.

Conceived during lockdown, D H Yeats has also been working on Drifting Aimlessly Through Lockdown. Around 70,000 words long, this work is also structured into three different parts and influenced by dreams (some enhanced in the waking hours!), memories, observations, daily news items and his tinnitus. 

At present, he is working on a series of vignettes based on random events he witnessed in the past which had they happened in the digital age, he is certain, would have gone around the world in seventy minutes.

His short story ‘Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! was published in Fusion: 21 Stories from the Complete Creative Writing Course, ed. Maggie Hamand, (2015).

He has taken part in several events in the past at venues such as the IKON gallery, Birmingham, the Shrewsbury Literary Festival. an online event for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the National Trust Back to Backs in Bimingham, the Folkestone Book Festival, the Bear Bookshop and he was a regular contributor to Birmingham Voices.