MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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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 […]
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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: Care Santos
October 22, 2015
Young Digital Reporter Elizabeth Gibson devours a delicious event with Spanish author Care Santos at Instituto Cervantes. There is something about chocolate. Its perfume, its allure… So strong is its charisma that it has enchanted many writers to weave it into their stories, such as Mexican classic Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Joanne Harris’s […]
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Review: Adam Marek and Diao Dou
October 22, 2015
Young Digital Reporter Calla Randall learns that surrealism is a game with rules to follow – and occasionally break – at a jolly afternoon with writers Adam Marek and Diao Dou AIDS and the Black Death still exist. There are treatments for both, but no cure yet for AIDS. In one of my favourite Adam Marek stories set at […]