Kirsty Taylor: Meet the talented Bradford poet awarded the Kay Mellor Fellowship

Her debut play Cashy C’s: The Musical, staged in October 2022 to deserved critical acclaim, was performed in a former frozen food store in Bradford city centre and was set in a pawnbroker shop, telling the stories of those struggling to survive in difficult circumstances for whom the shop was a lifeline. Featuring an original score of grime, bassline and rap music produced by local artists, it was a timely, urgent and hard-hitting piece, yet infused with Taylor’s characteristic warmth and humour.

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Last month Taylor was announced as the latest recipient of the Kay Mellor Fellowship. Established by the Leeds writer, director, actor and producer in 2019, the first fellowship was awarded to Kat Rose Martin in 2020 and continues in memory of Mellor, who died in 2022, with a new three year-investment from Leeds Playhouse, Mellor’s TV production company Rollem Productions, the BBC and Leeds City Council.

“I am delighted and so excited,” says Taylor. “It is a pretty unique opportunity to get that kind of support for emerging and mid-career writers and the legacy of someone like Kay Mellor is wonderful because it means it is acknowledged that women’s voices are really important and working class voices are really important.”

Taylor’s work aligns closely with Mellor’s in terms of championing the often-unheard stories of those traditionally underrepresented on stage and screen. And during her Fellowship, she will be exploring the themes of adoption and severance from the perspective of birth families, working with local groups to research and develop both a stage play and a TV pitch which tells the stories of how and why children get taken into care.

“As part of the application process you had to pitch an idea and I had worked with a group of birth mothers a few years ago and have also worked quite a lot with care experienced young people,” says Taylor. “You don’t hear much about the perspective of the mothers who have had their kids taken away from them. It is often connected with domestic violence, class and whether they have been in care themselves. It is a systemic problem and once the kids have been moved it’s really difficult. The groups I have worked with in the past and will be working with are trying to make sure that the birth mothers still have a relationship with their families. Quite a lot of the women are victims of an abusive relationship that they couldn’t get out of in time. Having met some of the mothers and the amazing workers who work with them, you can see how women who have had their kids moved are frequently demonized and I want to tell people that it is not necessarily what you think it is – they are victims of a failing system.”

Taylor will be on a year-long attachment with Leeds Playhouse and Rollem Productions, being guided, mentored and supported by both organisations to develop her idea. “Theatre and television are both quite new to me, so it is wonderful to have all that support and experience around me,” she says. “I’m passionate about telling authentic stories about real people and this opportunity will allow me to explore how I go about doing that to bigger audiences and take my work to the next level.”

There is a certain amount of pressure on Taylor with this new project as on the back of the huge success of Cashy C’s expectations are high. “Yeah, it’s like the difficult second album,” she says, laughing. “With Cashy C’s it was all totally new and I was basically just making it up as I went along with an amazing team of people. The response to it was fantastic, but we really didn’t know if audiences would come to see it. So, for people to be still talking about it is amazing. It was the biggest learning in my life and it is nice now to be able to refer to that process.” There is no doubt that she will rise to the challenge and she is looking forward to getting started and building on her skills as a writer. “I have good memories of working on that first production and it has given me the hunger to do another,” she says. “This is quite a different theme and I am excited to delve into it.”