MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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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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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: 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: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
September 20, 2017
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ was born in Lagos. Her debut novel, Stay With Me, was shortlisted for the 2017 Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction. A warm, funny and engaging read, Stay With Me explores the complexities of marriage, motherhood, family and grief amid the social and political turbulence of 80s Nigeria. New York Times book critic Michiko […]
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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: Michael Symmons Roberts
August 29, 2017
Michael Symmons Roberts launches his seventh collection of poetry, Mancunia, at this year’s Manchester Literature Festival, where he – and others – will perform these new poems of the city. Michael’s six previous collections, including Drysalter and Corpus have been awarded the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. He has […]
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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: 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 […]