Ray Hearne: I have chosen pieces not published elsewhere but which remain representative of my work since the millennium, i.e. a continuing sequence of writings wrestling with my attempts, as the child of immigrants, to define my sense of South Yorkshire-ness. From rural Catholic Ireland to Parkgate, a steel community, surrounded by chimneys, engirdled by collieries. A people defined by their labour in heavy industries, living in landscapes scorched, ravaged and degraded, speaking their own variants of a language scoffed at by the arbiters of good English. I kind of loved it. Written in the last few years the poems try to articulate the smoke-choked experience of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ryan Bramley: As a small boy, I grew up at the fringe of the world: Thurnscoe. I sat in the borough of Barnsley, with a Sheffield postcode and a Rotherham phone code; and yet, my little red terraced-house seemed closer to Doncaster than anything else. It set the tone for life to be lived on the periphery, and that's where my poem in this chapter finds itself: in a contested space between working-class pride, and middle-class aspiration; between belonging and rootlessness. The piece I have written centres on a large village called Wath-Upon-Dearne (or, as my lot at home used to say, ‘Waff-on-Dearne’), and how its former grammar-school-turned-comprehensive has long been heralded as one of South Yorkshire's brighter beacons of education – not because it teaches people how to value Rotherham, or Barnsley, or Doncaster, as home; but because it equips budding young students with the tools required to leave this place for good. And in my eyes, that's a great shame.

The film of the book of the film