Jake Thackray – The Unsung Writer is an anthology of Jake’s writing which gives readers a chance to explore his creativity and development as a wordsmith beyond the songs.
 
Jake Thackray loved using words to entertain, move, surprise and provoke, and he was a wordsmith long before and after he became a songwriter. His prose, like his songs, can be hilarious, irreverent, poignant, fanciful, quirky, poetic and imaginative, and distinctly musical in its sound, rhythms and cadences.
 
This new collection includes, among other things, more than one hundred of Jake's acclaimed, highly entertaining and beautifully crafted columns for the Yorkshire Post and Catholic Herald, along with his early love poetry, an amusing short story and spoken word pieces written for the radio and stage. It also includes the charming script for The Golden Ukulele, a musical written for Jake's pupils in the sixties, in which a cherub called Wilf inadvertently leaves his harp on a train when he is booted off it for not having a ticket. The harp gets mistaken for a ukulele at the station lost property office in Great Wipings, and in the chaos which follows, Jake gently ridicules every figure of authority in the town...
 
By agreement with the Thackray family, proceeds from the book will be going to Amnesty International, a cause which Jake supported.