MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Previewing our 10th Anniversary Festival
August 19, 2015
We’ve been thrilled with the reaction to our 2015 programme, which has just gone on sale this week. This year marks a full decade of MLF, so we had to make it a special one. Our glorious brochures are out now (download one here) or you can peruse our 85 events on our website and […]
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Catching up with our Festival Directors
June 8, 2015
If we’ve gone a bit quiet on the blogging front, it’s because we’re busy at work finalising our tenth anniversary programme. We grabbed a few minutes with Festival Co-Directors Sarah-Jane Roberts and Cathy Bolton to ask them about what the day-to-day work of running the Festival is like, what inspired their love of literature and what we can expect from […]
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Review: Jenny Offill
March 27, 2015
Festival Blogger Benjamin Judge will never be best mates with Dept. of Speculation author Jenny Offill. But he’s okay with that. And he enjoyed the Folio-shortlisted author’s recent event at the Anthony Burgess Foundation… I had a plan for the evening: Go see Jenny Offill. Shout “OMG I’M YOUR BIGGEST FAN” at the most […]
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Review: Jon Ronson
March 13, 2015
Festival blogger Kate Ashley enjoys an evening with Jon Ronson and John Robb that covers everything from Twitter witch hunts to the writer’s early career in Manchester. Jon Ronson never wanted to be a writer when he was growing up; a life spent sitting alone in a room seemed depressing and dull. But now that […]
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Review: David Mitchell, take two
November 26, 2014
Young Digital Reporter Jack Clare gives us his own take on our David Mitchell event at RNCM… So the lights went down and then a man came on stage. He did an introduction, but I can’t really remember what he said because I was too busy marveling at his facial hair. It was a moustache […]
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Review: David Mitchell
November 18, 2014
Festival Blogger Robert Cutforth takes an unconventional approach to reviewing the David Mitchell event at RNCM: an imagined letter from the author to reviewer – fitting, as Mitchell advised aspiring writers to write letters to themselves from their characters to learn about them. (This letter is not actually from David Mitchell, just to be perfectly […]
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Review: Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Central Library
November 18, 2014
Young Digital Reporter Rebecca Roe visits an unusual poetry event at Central Library as part of the Chaos to Order programme… The first thing that I noticed when I entered Manchester’s Central Library café is the noise. In one room of the building the band Everything Everything was playing from behind a glass wall, replacing […]
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Review: John Lahr on Tennessee Williams; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
November 10, 2014
Festival blogger Charlotte Rowland enjoys an evening of two halves: a talk with John Lahr about American playwright Tennessee Williams and then a performance of one of his most celebrated plays at the Royal Exchange Theatre. If there is one word that the dramas of playwright Tennessee Williams do not spell out, it is victory. […]
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Review: Northern Lights Writers Conference with Will Self
October 27, 2014
Robert Cutforth reports back from the Northern Lights Writers Conference at Sale Waterside, where he has an unsettling encounter with Will Self … The Northern Lights Writers Conference starts pleasantly enough with writers Joanna Kavenna and Jo Bell discussing the difficulties in extracting money from people who ask us to write something for them. It’s […]
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Review: Kate Tempest
October 27, 2014
Festival blogger Abi Hynes is staggered, shattered and blown away by performance poet Kate Tempest’s MLF gig… I don’t know how to write this review. I really, really don’t. See, trouble is, I went to this gig on Saturday night, and it had a pretty big effect on me. I say ‘gig’ – because ‘poetry […]