’Kes’ writer Barry Hines dies in Britain

LONDON: Author Barry Hines, whose novel “A Kestrel For A Knave” captured the spirit of 1960s British working-class youth and was the basis for Ken Loach’s award-winning film “Kes,” has died, friends said Sunday.
“Very sad news: the great writer Barry Hines, creator of Barnsley’s defining myth A Kestrel For A Knave, has died. Rest in peace,” poet Ian McMillan, who shared a publisher with Hines, wrote on Twitter.
Mark Hodkinson, founder of Hines’s publishers Pomona, confirmed the author’s death aged 76 in an obituary for the Guardian newspaper. He was reportedly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in recent years.
Published in 1968, Hines’s most famous book is a work of social realism which tells the story of Billy Casper, a boy who escapes his troubled life by training a kestrel. His brother Richard recently published a memoir which detailed how he had been a teenage falconer and had inspired his brother’s work.