MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Review: Sinead Morrissey & Douglas Dunn
October 13, 2017
Sahar Abbas reviews our evening with Sinead Morrissey and Douglas Dunn, hosted by Vona Groarke. At the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, under the Cosmo Rodewald Theatre’s star-filled ceiling, two very special stars themselves – Sinead Morrissey and Douglas Dunn – recited poems of undeniable truth and sheer honesty from their new collections, […]
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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: 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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Young Digital Reporter Review: Eimear McBride
November 1, 2016
“Write about the truth of what it is like to be human”: Our Young Digital Reporter Laura Cooper reports on our recent in-conversation event with Eimear McBride. Eimar McBride is a novelist whose reviews are dogged by comparisons to James Joyce. Hardly a bad comparison for a writer early in their career, but it does limit […]
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Review: Eimear McBride
October 31, 2016
‘I like to be praised incessantly’: Our blogger Tara Sherman is delighted by the ‘insightful, funny and assured’ Eimear McBride at this year’s Festival. Be humane as a reader. That was a tip from Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, two equally brilliant novels that are built […]
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Review: Anne Enright
October 26, 2016
“You don’t really know why you’re going to write something the way you do until afterwards.”: Our blogger Phil Olsen headed to Hallé St Peter’s to hear Anne Enright reading and discussing her latest novel The Green Road, at this year’s Festival. Standing under the arches and the half-dome of Hallé St Peters, Centre for New […]
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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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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: True Harmony: Yeats at 150
October 22, 2015
Festival Blogger Abi Hynes is stirred by a lively musical and poetic seance raising the spirit of William Butler Yeats I was by no means an expert in WB Yeats when I joined MLF in a packed-out hall at the Whitworth Art Gallery last Thursday, to summon the poet’s ghost. The event was conceived of […]
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Review: Kevin Barry and John McAuliffe
October 16, 2015
MLF Young Digital Reporter Kieran Lambe takes in an evening of high-wire poetry and prose in the company of two great writers at The University of Manchester’s Martin Harris Centre. Newly in from the October cold, audience members take their seats in the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall. They place coats and scarves over seat backs, […]