Caliban Shrieks, published in 1935 is a working-class masterpiece – a lyrical tour of the life of a young man born in the first days of the 20^th century.  Its author Jack Hilton was born in Oldham in 1900. The novel was lost to time until rediscovered by Jack Chadwick in the Salford Working Class Movement Library in 2022. Discover the story of the novel’s creation which is every bit as extraordinary as the man whose life it tells. The same is true of its return, its long overdue second life.

Jack Hilton was born in the opening days of 1900 in Oldham, Lancashire. He served in the army during the First World War and, after a period of homelessness and working odd jobs, became an active member of Rochdale’s Worker’s Rights movement, where his rallying speeches led to a court-order banning him from further speechwriting. Jack Hilton died on 26 May 1983. 

‘Witty and unusual’ George Orwell
‘Magnificent’ W H Auden