MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Spotlight On: Dead Ink
May 19, 2020
Continuing our series of Q&As with publishers in the Northern Fiction Alliance, this week we interview Nathan Connolly, Publishing Director at Liverpool’s Dead Ink. The publisher behind the groundbreaking anthology Know Your Place: Essays by The Working Class for The Working Class, Dead Ink describe themselves as ‘a small, ambitious and experimental literary publisher’. When […]
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Spotlight On: Bluemoose Books
April 21, 2020
When and why did you start Bluemoose Books? We started Bluemoose Books in 2006 to find great new writers and stories, especially from the North and from working class backgrounds. Publishing at that time seemed to be dominated by celebrity publishing and we knew that readers were looking for stories that reflected their lives and experiences. Our authors […]
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Spotlight On: Comma Press
April 7, 2020
Why did you start Comma Press? To mess with the ways artists and cultural products, like books, rise into public consciousness. Too often artists ‘break through’ because aspects of the their personality, self-cultivated image or backstory fit with existing narratives about ‘the artist’; consequently, the art world tends to privilege the already privileged. To re-level […]
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Q&A: Lyndall Gordon
October 4, 2017
Lyndall Gordon’s new literary biography, Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, is an exciting and provocative look at the lives and work of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf, and explores the relationship between their creativity and their status as outsiders in society. Lyndall is the award-winning author […]
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Q&A: Megan Hunter
September 29, 2017
Megan Hunter is the author of The End We Start From, a debut novel that tells the story of what befalls a mother and her new baby when London is hit by a cataclysmic environmental disaster. Beautifully written, with a narrative that unfolds as a series of poetic fragments, the book has received rapturous reviews […]
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Q&A: Jon McGregor
September 14, 2017
Jon McGregor is the author of the lyrical, inventive and acclaimed novels If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (winner of the Betty Trask Prize and Somerset Maugham Award), So Many Ways to Begin, and Even the Dogs and the short story collection This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You. He […]
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Q&A: Tara Bergin
September 4, 2017
Tara Bergin is a poet and scholar whose second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, has just been shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Eleanor, a pioneering sociologist and translator of Madame Bovary (and daughter of Karl Marx) committed suicide, like Flaubert’s heroine Emma Bovary; Tara’s wry and daring poems explore […]
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Q&A: Kit de Waal
August 23, 2017
Kit de Waal is the author of the bestselling debut novel My Name is Leon, and a writer whose short fiction has received multiple awards. Before she became widely known as a writer, Kit worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law and served as a magistrate; My Name is Leon sensitively addresses the […]
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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 […]