MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
-
Review: Simon Schama
November 10, 2017
Young Digital Reporter Matthew Singleton reports on our event with Simon Schama It was a packed and perhaps surprisingly loud auditorium prior to the talk, considering the focus of the on-stage conversation would be on an 800 page, 5-decade-spanning tome. But that is the appeal of Simon Schama, a man known for his engaging histories […]
-
Review: Radical Literature Walking Tour
November 3, 2017
Our Manchester Radical Literature Walking Tour reviewed by Young Digital Reporter Gabriella Tavini While the sun set beneath the rose coloured clouds in a surprisingly striking Mancunian skyline, a party of around fifty eager tour-goers gathered outside Manchester Cathedral. The tour had sold out and everyone was wrapped in great wooly scarfs and silence, poised […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
Review: Yuval Noah Harari
September 19, 2016
Is human equality a notion that is approaching its sell-by date? MLF blogger Holly Aszkenasy reports back from our recent event with Sapiens and Homo Deus author Yuval Noah Harari. In his best-selling Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari took us on a grand tour of humankind, beginning with the violent overrun of planet Earth by […]
-
Q&A: Laura Dockrill
September 28, 2015
Laura Dockrill is the author of the Darcy Burdock series, as well as Mistakes in the Underground and Ugly Shy Girl. Her new book for Young Adult readers is mermaid coming of-age tale Lorali. She’s a prolific writer, performer and artist whose work takes in a wide variety of artforms and audiences. Michael Rosen said […]
-
Review: Gaskell’s Manchester Walking Tour
October 20, 2014
Festival blogger Abi Hynes takes to the city streets for a crash course in Mrs. Gaskell’s Manchester… Confession time: I have never been on a walking tour before. I am an Elizabeth Gaskell fan, but usually more of the – you know – sitting down kind. So you’ll have to forgive a few obvious observations […]
-
Review: Faber New Poets
October 16, 2014
MLF Blogger Charlotte Rowland braved the Manchester rain to see four of the Faber New Poets read at Central Library… Four poets, four colour-coded books, and only one rainy October night to learn what they all have in common. Or don’t. That’s right. Faber New Poets have come around, again, for the third time, following […]