MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Review: The Letters Page
November 6, 2015
Sarah-Clare Conlon hears about a literary journal that’s really pushing the envelope – The Letters Page, edited by novelist and short story writer Jon McGregor I was going to tell you all about the amazing venue that is Elizabeth Gaskell’s House; how me and Fat Roland set up ideas of parties in the posh dining […]
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Review: An Evening With Carol Ann Duffy
October 25, 2015
Abi Hynes enjoys an audience with Carol Ann Duffy, discussing poetry, writing and life. This was my first encounter with our delightfully local Poet Laureate, despite the fact I’ve been a fan since I was a teenager. She was the first poet I studied at school that I felt any sort of connection to; perhaps, thinking back, […]
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Review: Tracey Thorn and Dave Haslam
October 25, 2015
Desmond Bullen revisits ‘days of hormone and heartbreak’ as Tracey Thorn and Dave Haslam share a few of their favourite songs for Jukebox Choice. This – thank heavens – isn’t ‘rock and roll’, yet Gorilla’s decommissioned nuclear bunker décor has just the same conjured up a gig-giddiness amongst its midlife critics, all sensible clothes and […]
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Review: Alexandra Harris on Virginia Woolf
October 25, 2015
Charlotte Rowland on an insightful journey into the mind of Virgina Woolf, with Alexandra Harris. ‘I widen my landscape’, writes Virginia Woolf, circa September, 1930, in a diary entry discussing excessive need for meaning, and the uselessness of writing without it. And, speaking on Woolf at the Anthony Burgess Foundation for a sold-out MLF event, Alexandra Harris […]
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Review: Carcanet New Poetries
October 25, 2015
Sarah-Clare Conlon reports on a busy event showcasing four very different poets, and celebrating the best of new poetry in the UK. The seats fill up quickly for this Carcanet Press-hosted event in Central Library’s modern Performance Space – no mean feat for a lunchtime on what has since proved to be one of Manchester’s last sunny days […]
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Review: Why I Write: A National Conversation event with Joanne Harris
October 25, 2015
What do writers owe their readers? LJ Spillane is pleasantly provoked by discussion of a newly commissioned Writer’s Manifesto by Joanne Harris, part of the National Conversation series. In the first half of tonight’s event on 19 October at the Martin Harris Centre, a talk given by Joanne Harris presents a series of questions on the reader/writer […]
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Review: Dave McKean
October 25, 2015
Festival Blogger Desmond Bullen enjoys an audence with the multitalented visual artist, illustrator and comics legend Dave McKean If the congregation taking up the pews at the Burgess Foundation are typical of his disciples, Dave McKean attracts a broad church; from the hormonal to the menopausal, from the skateboarder to the rocker, from the dressed […]
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Review: Iain Pears
October 22, 2015
Kate Woodward explores interactive fiction in the company of Arcadia author Iain Pears Manchester was grey and wet, and it was a delight to escape into The International Anthony Burgess Foundation – the welcome was warm, as always. Burgess himself was a man with diverse interests: a novelist, playwright, composer and journalist and it seemed […]
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Review: Kathryn Williams
October 22, 2015
After discovering singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams at this year’s Festival, MLF Blogger Fran Slater is a fan. Here he reports on her performance of Hypoxia, an album inspired by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, at Hallé St Peters. I’ve been attending the Manchester Literature Festival for six years now. Each year it grows, the line-up becomes […]
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Review: Bidisha and Gulwali Passarlay
October 22, 2015
Fran Slater is powerfully moved by an afternoon with Bidisha and refugee-turned-author Gulwali Passarlay. If there’s a timelier event taking place at this year’s festival, I’ll eat all of the hats I have ever owned. Right in the middle of an era-defining humanitarian crisis, and with the refugee debate raging across the front pages on […]