MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Review: Susan Calman
November 2, 2016
Festival blogger Sarah Jasmon headed to The Dancehouse where comedian and author Susan Calman explained that ‘depression isn’t the end of everything.’ ‘I’m not a medical doctor,’ Susan Calman says, ‘but I’ve watched Casualty, I can do a tracheotomy with a biro.’ I turn to the woman next to me. ‘I can do a tracheotomy with a […]
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Review: Deborah Levy
November 2, 2016
‘Sometimes we want to un-belong as much as we want to belong’. Our blogger Sarah-Clare Conlon reports from the Manchester Art Gallery where Deborah Levy read and discussed her MLF commission in response to the Fashion & Freedom exhibition. It’s not easy to navigate a path through the downstairs gallery where the Fashion & Freedom exhibition is […]
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Review: Refugee Tales: Marina Lewycka & Dragan Todorovic
November 2, 2016
“We don’t always hear about refugees as individuals – with families, with hopes, with tales of trauma”. Our blogger Katherine Reed headed to Anthony Burgess Foundation to discover two of the Refugee Tales. “These stories change you,” said the writer Dragan Todorovic. As part of the Refugee Tales project he had met a Syrian refugee, […]
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Review: Margaret Drabble
November 2, 2016
‘Everyone survives old age differently.” Our blogger Rebecca Audra Smith is delighted by Margaret Drabble’s writing and empathetic spirit. You must read Margaret Drabble. So concluded my Granma in response to my whine of ‘I’ve run out of books to read.’ A week later I’ve finished The Millstone and am telling everyone: you must read Margaret Drabble. […]
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Young Digital Reporter Review: Reader, I Married Him
November 2, 2016
MLF’s Young Digital Reporter Bryony Makin reports from Central Library, where enjoyed a night with Tracy Chevalier and Nadifa Mohamed. Reader, I arrived late. Very late in fact. After being stuck in a gridlock below Deansgate I trudged through the downpour to arrive halfway through the event. In a convenient coincidence worthy of the novel itself […]
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Review: Writing Karachi: Mohammed Hanif & Kamila Shamsie
November 1, 2016
“It is a place to get lost in, because nobody knows who you are.” Our blogger Amy McCauley heads to Whitworth Art Gallery to discover the complexities of Karachi, in the company of two authors who have called it home. The Whitworth Gallery offers a warm welcome to two novelists – Kamila Shamsie and Mohammed […]
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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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Young Digital Reporter Review: Hollie McNish & Salena Godden
October 31, 2016
MLF’s Young Digital Reporter Jess Molyneux reports from Gorilla, where two stars of the UK performance poetry scene, Hollie McNish and Salena Godden, lit up the stage. After a promising introduction from MLF’s Kate Feld, Hollie McNish took to the stage and immediately endeared herself to the audience by noting that she had matched her t-shirt to […]
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Review: Reader, I Married Him
October 31, 2016
Festival blogger Abi Hynes headed to Central Library to hear award-winning authors Nadifa Mohamed and Tracy Chevalier reading their stories to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. As it turns out, I have some very strong opinions about Jane Eyre. It’s one of those books that I have reread so often since childhood that […]