Essex Book Festival: Wes Streeting

About the book

An inspiring, witty East End growing up memoir by leading Labour MP Wes Streeting, vividly portraying the power of family and education to help him escape poverty and transform his life.

Wes Streeting might have ended up in prison rather than in parliament. His maternal grandfather Bill, an unsuccessful armed robber, spent time behind bars, as did his grandmother, who was also a political campaigner.

Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him. In One Boy, Two Bills and A Fry Up he brings to life the poverty, humiliation and incredible struggle for them choosing whether to feed the meter and heat the flat, put carpet on the floor, or food on the table.

Wes Streeting knows it was the help and inspiration he received from the great characters that surrounded him, especially his paternal grandfather (also called Bill), that ultimately set him on the way to Cambridge and then Parliament. He knew he could draw on the strengths in childhood to eventually come out, and to go on and face his now successful struggle with kidney cancer.

This honest, uplifting, affectionate memoir is a tribute to the love and support which set him on his way out of poverty, and informs everything about Wes Streeting’s mission now in politics.

About the author

Wes Streeting is a Labour MP and the Shadow Health Secretary. He read History at Selwyn College, Cambridge and began his political vocation as President of the National Union of Students. Afterwards he became Head of Education at Stonewall and served in local government, before being elected as an MP in 2015.

Essex Book Festival

Essex Book Festival is one of the highlights of the county’s cultural calendar.

Each year the festival hosts 100+ events in a range of venues across Essex, extending from Chelmsford Theatres, Basildon Library, Chalkwell Hall,

University of Essex and Anglia Ruskin University, Harlow Museum, Focal Point Gallery, and Wivenhoe Bookshop, to Jaywick Martello Tower, Cressing Temple Barns, and Tudor Palace Layer Marney Tower.

The Festival was established by Essex County Council in 1999 to celebrate the book in all its forms with the widest possible audiences.

It has grown exponentially since then. Now recognised as one of the leading festivals of its kind in the East of England, it invites writers and artists from all over the world to take part in its activities and events.

In addition, it hosts a year-round series of writing and reading programmes for all ages and abilities, including writing workshops in HMP & YOI Chelmsford. It became an independent charity run by a board of volunteer trustees in 2011.

This, in turn, led to a number of new opportunities, not least of all in terms of the wide range of partners with which it now works: both within Essex, and nationally and internationally.

The Essex Book Festival is based with the Centre for Creative Writing at University of Essex Colchester Campus.