MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Q&A: Mike McCormack
September 27, 2017
‘The Angelus bell ringing out over its villages and townlands over the fields and hills and bogs in between, six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void…’ So begins Mike McCormack‘s Solar Bones, which captures the whole sprawl of a life in one exhilarating […]
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Q&A: Raymond Antrobus
August 22, 2017
Poet Raymond Antrobus starts off our series of interviews with writers appearing in this year’s Festival. He is a British-Jamiacan poet, performer and educator who has published the chapbooks Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus (Burning Eye Books) and To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press) and co-curates the London spoken word poetry show Chill Pill. He […]
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Q&A: Horatio Clare
October 13, 2016
Horatio Clare is an author and journalist. He has written two memoirs, the Somerset Maugham Award-winning Running for the Hills and Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope, as well as two works of travel and nature writing. His latest book, Orison for A Curlew, a combination of travel and nature writing, was released in 2015. […]
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Q&A: Sungju Lee
October 11, 2016
Sungju Lee‘s memoir, Every Falling Star, introduces young adult readers to his native North Korea, a place where personal freedom and self-expression are sharply limited. Before his event at this year’s Festival, we spoke with the author about how his life experiences became an encouraging story for young people around the world. How did you […]
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Q&A: Andrew Michael Hurley
October 3, 2016
Andrew Michael Hurley‘s debut novel The Loney won the 2015 Costa First Novel Award and was named Book of the Year at the 2016 British Book Awards. The author has said that his novel set in the Morecambe Bay edgelands was his attempt ‘to write a kind of dark version of the Nativity, exploring ideas […]
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Q&A: Andrew McMillan
September 30, 2016
Andrew McMillan‘s debut collection of poetry, Physical, is a hymn to the male body, male friendship and male love that Michael Symmons Roberts called “a glorious, vivid exploration of the body as the loved and broken ground on which we meet and are transformed.” It won the Guardian First Book Award and the Fenton Aldeburgh […]
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Q&A: Garth Greenwell
September 23, 2016
Garth Greenwell‘s debut novel What Belongs to You has created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, and was recently shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award. A beautifully written book about desire and its consequences, it tracks the complicated relationship between an American teacher […]
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Q&A: Sarah Howe
September 19, 2016
Poet Sarah Howe‘s pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopaedia, was published in 2009, and she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2010. Her first full-length collection, Loop of Jade, won the 2015 TS Eliot Prize: the first ever debut collection to be awarded one of British poetry’s most prestigious prizes. AS Byatt called it ‘one of […]
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Q&A: Megan Bradbury
September 1, 2016
Megan Bradbury‘s novel Everyone Is Watching is something of a hybrid: it employs fiction to tell the stories of famous real people, and the story of New York. The writer’s attention latches on to key figures in the city’s creative history – writer Edmund White, poet Walt Whitman, city planner Robert Moses and photographer Robert […]
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Q&A: Jami Attenberg
October 9, 2015
Jami Attenberg is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Middlesteins. Her new book Saint Mazie brings to life the big-hearted Queen of The Bowery who held court from the ticket booth of The Venice movie theatre. Weaving together fictionalised diaries, writings and interviews, Attenberg has constructed a portrait of a remarkable woman and […]