Faber scoops writer and cultural documentarian Emma Warren’s history of the youth club

Faber has acquired writer and cultural documentarian Emma Warren’s Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History, a "searching look at the rise and fall of the youth club".

Publishing director Hannah Knowles acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Crystal Mahey-Morgan at OWN IT! Literary, Film and TV Agency, and the book will be published in September 2025.

"In Up the Youth Club, Emma Warren maps the shifting story of youth clubs in the UK and Northern Ireland, from factory workers in Victorian Boys’ and Girls’ clubs to renegade self-emancipatory spaces in the 1970s and the music-generating youth clubs of more recent decades," the synopsis says. "With a mixed lineage in church evangelism, the patronage of the upper classes, grassroots DIY, and erratic state funding, the youth club has had a huge, yet almost invisible effect on music, sport, culture and society."

It adds: "With this impassioned history, Warren invites us to pick up the torch and play an active part in protecting and re-igniting this vital part of UK society."

Knowles said: "It’s hard to think of a more pressing topic than how we back and champion young people today, nor a writer better suited to write on the subject than Emma. In focusing on the history of youth clubs and youth workers, she brings these essential spaces and communities to life with her characteristic humanity, humour and wisdom, compelling us as reader to pick up the torch in their support." 

Warren added: "Like many people in this country, I attended youth club in my early teens and, as an adult, I’ve worked in them too. This book is powered by these twin perspectives: of teenagers who need places where they can just be, and of grounded youth workers who create warm and welcoming environments."