[1][3] For his dissertation, Hines wrote a piece of creative fiction entitled "Flight of the Hawk", which later inspired his debut novel The Blinder.
A duologue between an impoverished coal miner and his manipulative business partner, it first appeared on BBC Radio Third Programme in 1965, with Arthur Lowe and Ronald Baddiley.
Garnett and Ken Loach, who had worked together on the Wednesday Plays Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, read the manuscript to the unpublished novel and purchased the rights for their new production company Kestrel Films in July 1967.
It tells the story of Billy Casper who was a troubled and neglected schoolboy living in a mining village who finds comfort in tending a kestrel that he names 'Kes'.
Disney later offered to buy the rights on the condition that the downbeat ending, in which Billy's brother Jud kills the kestrel, be changed; Hines refused.
[13][14] Hines continued writing novels, plays and television scripts throughout the 1970s, with much of his output centring on the tensions of labour and industry that characterised British society at the time.
He adapted Billy's Last Stand for the theatre in 1971, with the titular character played by Ian McKellen, and published First Signs, a novel following a young expatriate in Italy returning to his northern hometown, in 1972.
[4] In 1984, Hines wrote the script for the BAFTA award-winning TV film Threads (1984), a speculative television drama examining the effects of nuclear war on Sheffield.
[16] Hines focused the narrative on a young couple in Sheffield dealing with an unexpected pregnancy as the threat of nuclear exchange escalates.
Although Sheffield was chosen due to its proximity to RAF bases and geographical centrality,[16] it also continued Hines' tradition of setting his work in and around South Yorkshire.
Hines received a personal letter of praise from Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and Jackson said that the film was viewed by President Ronald Reagan when it was broadcast on American television the following year.
In 2009, after Hines' diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease prevented him from further writing, Pomona Books published This Artistic Life, an anthology of previously unpublished short stories mostly written around the time of A Kestrel for a Knave.
[19] According to Dave Gibson, Hines' work is "characterised by his ear for dialogue, his sympathetic use of Barnsley dialect and his identification with working-class struggles".
Imogen Carter notes that A Kestrel for a Knave features "dazzling natural imagery, reminiscent of Seamus Heaney's 1966 poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist.
[24][25] Hines claimed he took no pleasure in receiving awards; his main concern was the approval of working-class readers and the confirmation that they had been represented accurately.