Sayling the Babel by Hylda Sims
- poetry & song collection -
published May 15th 2006
by Hearing Eye
£9-99

Hylda's most recent work featuring songs and poems is now available from her online shop.

Inspecting the Island by Hylda Sims
- the Summerhill Novel -
published November 10th 2000
by Seven-Ply Yarns
£7-99 ISBN 2 5 0 9538797 0 4

In 2000 Ofsted’s attempt to force Summerhill School to change its free ways or close was defeated in a court case creating headlines round the world. This novel explores similar territory although written eighteen months before the event. A case of fiction preceding fact. Hylda Sims was a pupil of A S Neill’s famous school. Inspecting the Island gives an insider’s portrait in fictional form of a place which has rarely been out of the news and which celebrates its eightieth birthday next year.

Conceived as a personal response to the notion of original sin implicit in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, this is a dramatic, tender and compelling novel which at the same time illustrates just how successful a self-governing community of children can be.

An Ofsted inspector, visiting a school which is the epitomy of everything he has been trained to dislike - pupil power, optional lessons, scruffiness - finds himself in conflict with his first and only love, his department and his own received ideas on education.

The story involves the re-developing relationship between Charlotte, ex-pupil of the school and the inspector, Jasper Bignold, against a background of crises in Jasper’s own life and in the life of the school.

If you would like to read Chapter One of Inspecting the Island click here

Reaching Peckham

Based on Hylda Sims' first novel Peckham Rising, Reaching Peckham is a collection of 39 poems that follow a narrative sequence.

The poems present a cast of Peckham's characters, and celebrate the history and landscape of this inner-London suburb; its council blocks, exotic street markets, pubs and magnificent parkland "the Rye", legendary stomping ground of Queen Boudicca.

With accompanying music ranging from Jazz to Folk to Hip-Hop provided by the Boudicca Band, the poems comprise a unique performance piece which has enjoyed enthusiastic responses from audiences at Dulwich Festival and the London fringe.

Reaching Peckham is published by Left Bank Press