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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Review: Will Self
October 13, 2017
Our reviewer Henry Cockburn is vastly entertained by an evening with Will Self Self lumbers onto the stage dressed in a quasi-uniform of Napoleonic blue and high-throated red, mutters to himself through a jawful of gum, then plays peek-a-boo with the armchair. The effect is of a large off-duty circus monkey. The audience leans in, […]
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Review: Malika Booker
October 13, 2017
Roma Havers reports from our event with poet Malika Booker at the International Anthony Burgess Centre Despite the slightly delayed start due to unpredictable UK train services, there was an energy of excitement and good faith as the audience turned to see Malika Booker arrive. After a brief introduction from the Royal Literary Fund, who […]
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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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Review: Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13
October 9, 2017
Tessa Harris reports from our event with novelist Jon McGregor and appreciates a new approach to the standard author event. “One of the things for me, about this book,” Jon McGregor explains before he starts the performance “is not to explain things… to people.” He doesn’t get the laugh he deserves. The audience is mostly […]
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Q&A: Lyndall Gordon
October 4, 2017
Lyndall Gordon’s new literary biography, Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, is an exciting and provocative look at the lives and work of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf, and explores the relationship between their creativity and their status as outsiders in society. Lyndall is the award-winning author […]
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Q&A: Megan Hunter
September 29, 2017
Megan Hunter is the author of The End We Start From, a debut novel that tells the story of what befalls a mother and her new baby when London is hit by a cataclysmic environmental disaster. Beautifully written, with a narrative that unfolds as a series of poetic fragments, the book has received rapturous reviews […]
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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: 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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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 […]