MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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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: Jean Sprackland
October 4, 2016
Jean Sprackland‘s new sequence of poems, Lock Songs, was inspired by a boating weekend along the Peak Forest Canal, from the countryside into the city of Manchester – and it was commissioned by MLF and the Canal & River Trust. Jean is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry including Tilt (winner of the […]
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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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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 […]
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Q&A: Henry Normal
September 15, 2016
You might say Henry Normal is a poet with a very successful sideline in television. As a television writer and producer, he’s responsible for bringing us classics such as The Mrs. Merton Show, The Royle Family and The Mighty Boosh. His seventh collection, Staring Directly at the Eclipse, offers poems about death, human frailty and […]
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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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Review: Irvine Welsh
April 12, 2016
So what has one of contemporary literature’s most violent psychopaths been up to lately? Festival blogger Fran Slater headed to The Dancehouse to find out, as Irvine Welsh discussed new novel The Blade Artist (and its protagonist, Trainspotting’s notorious Francis Begbie) with Kevin Sampson. Entering The Dancehouse on this wet Sunday evening was a strange experience. We were here […]