MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Review: Dorthe Nors
November 3, 2017
Our reviewer Phil Olsen enjoys a captivating talk about writing, translation and stories that ‘take place in a breath’ with Danish author Dorthe Nors. The opening Saturday of this year’s festival was a good day for fans of short stories. It was also a good day for fans of holing up in the International Anthony […]
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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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Review: Sarah Howe
November 8, 2016
MLF blogger Amy McCauley attends our event with poet Sarah Howe, where she finds a robust poetics ‘brimming with questions’ alongside ‘a refusal to offer easy answers’. The question of voices and inheritances – cultural, social, historical and familial – travels across Sarah Howe’s work, and her astonishing performance at the Anthony Burgess Foundation confirms […]
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Review: The Real Story with Horatio Clare
November 7, 2016
‘True stories, well told.’ Festival blogger Melissa Brakel headed to International Anthony Burgess Foundation to hear memoirist and travel writer Horatio Clare and the essayists of The Real Story. ‘These stories could just as easily be fiction as non-fiction.’ So says the person in the row behind me. Having the quality of fiction is in […]
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Review: Writing the North
November 7, 2016
Our blogger Desmond Bullen reports from International Anthony Burgess Foundation, where Jenn Ashworth and Andrew Michael Hurley were in conversation about their haunting Northwest novels that follow families in search of a miracle. Gathered beneath cheerless, leaden skies, in a building – full to overflowing – that thrums with its own ghosts, both industrial and illustrious, […]
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Review: Olivia Laing
October 21, 2016
‘People have lived with shame and isolation, and have succeeded, and we need to be reminded of that’: Our blogger Natalie Kane reports on our recent in-conversation event with Olivia Laing. As Manchester is falling headfirst into autumn, into darker hours with emptier trees, a warm shuffle of coated people make their way into Anthony […]
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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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Review: Rising Stars Day
November 17, 2015
Three literature events in a day? Our blogger Benjamin Judge takes on the challenge of blogging our Rising Stars Day, but discovers he may have bitten off more than he can chew. Hey, Manchester Literature Festival. Shall we? Shall we count the ways? Yes, let’s. Three events, one day, six writers, one host, one blogger… […]
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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 […]