MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Review: Sinead Morrissey & Douglas Dunn
October 13, 2017
Sahar Abbas reviews our evening with Sinead Morrissey and Douglas Dunn, hosted by Vona Groarke. At the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, under the Cosmo Rodewald Theatre’s star-filled ceiling, two very special stars themselves – Sinead Morrissey and Douglas Dunn – recited poems of undeniable truth and sheer honesty from their new collections, […]
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Review: Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13
October 9, 2017
Tessa Harris reports from our event with novelist Jon McGregor and appreciates a new approach to the standard author event. “One of the things for me, about this book,” Jon McGregor explains before he starts the performance “is not to explain things… to people.” He doesn’t get the laugh he deserves. The audience is mostly […]
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Review: An Evening with Zadie Smith
December 9, 2016
Our Young Digital Reporter Laura Cooper reports from a wonderful evening of literature and conversation with Zadie Smith Having already appeared at events in Cambridge and London, Zadie Smith paid a visit to Manchester Central Library on 24th November for a conversation with Katie Popperwell to bookend the 2016 Manchester Literature Festival. She was here to […]
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Review: An Evening with Alan Cumming
December 8, 2016
Our blogger Emily Morris reports back from a highly entertaining evening in the company of actor and writer Alan Cumming Alan Cumming features regularly in my Saturday evenings, but it’s usually on the screen of my laptop as Eli Gold, a wily, often rude but somehow loveable political campaigner, in CBS series The […]
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Review: An Evening with Vivienne Westwood
December 8, 2016
Blogger Sarah-Clare Conlon reviews our event with author, designer, activist and style icon Vivienne Westwood at this year’s Festival “I had a duty to exploit my talent,” said Dame Vivienne Westwood at the end of this event promoting Get A Life: The Diaries of Vivienne Westwood, answering a question about how she became a […]
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Review: Johnny Marr
November 16, 2016
What happens when a Mancunian music god comes home to celebrate the launch of his life story? Our blogger Adam Farrer finds out. The Royal Northern College of Music became a church tonight; the audience, a congregation. While this building is no stranger to hosting revered musical figures, Johnny Marr, legendary guitarist and songwriter with The […]
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Review: The Good Immigrant
November 11, 2016
Our blogger Yezuan Calvis gives us one good immigrant’s perspective on an evening with the writers of the celebrated new anthology The Good Immigrant ‘Illegal’, ‘languages’, ‘exile’, ‘unmentionable’. Those are the first words that came to people’s minds when I asked them about the word ‘immigrant’ as a part of my research for this blog […]
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Review: Sarah Howe
November 8, 2016
MLF blogger Amy McCauley attends our event with poet Sarah Howe, where she finds a robust poetics ‘brimming with questions’ alongside ‘a refusal to offer easy answers’. The question of voices and inheritances – cultural, social, historical and familial – travels across Sarah Howe’s work, and her astonishing performance at the Anthony Burgess Foundation confirms […]
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Young Digital Reporter Review: Susan Calman
November 8, 2016
‘I kind of forgot that anyone would actually read it’: Young Digital Reporter Bryony Makin reports on our recent event with author and comedian Susan Calman. ‘If I become upset,’ Susan Calman warned the audience before her conversation with host Viv Groskop, ‘I’m fine. You don’t need to feel bad’. Which put a finger on […]
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Review: Jean Sprackland
November 8, 2016
Our blogger Rebecca Hurst reports from Hope Mill Theatre, where Jean Sprackland, winner of the Costa Poetry Award, presented a new sequence of poems, Lock Songs, inspired by a boating weekend along the Peak Forest Canal. On Sunday 23 October I made my way through crowds of Manchester City supporters to Hope Mill Theatre in […]