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MLF Chapter & VerseMLF Chapter & Verse

The Manchester Literature Festival Blog

  • 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 […]

  • Q&A: Kit de Waal

    August 23, 2017

    Kit de Waal is the author of the bestselling debut novel My Name is Leon, and a writer whose short fiction has received multiple awards. Before she became widely known as a writer, Kit worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law and served as a magistrate; My Name is Leon sensitively addresses the […]

  • Review: An Evening with Alan Cumming

    December 8, 2016

    Our blogger Emily Morris reports back from a highly entertaining evening in the company of actor and writer Alan Cumming     Alan Cumming features regularly in my Saturday evenings, but it’s usually on the screen of my laptop as Eli Gold, a wily, often rude but somehow loveable political campaigner, in CBS series The […]

  • Review: An Evening with Vivienne Westwood

    December 8, 2016

    Blogger Sarah-Clare Conlon reviews our event with author, designer, activist and style icon Vivienne Westwood at this year’s Festival   “I had a duty to exploit my talent,” said Dame Vivienne Westwood at the end of this event promoting Get A Life: The Diaries of Vivienne Westwood, answering a question about how she became a […]

  • Review: Johnny Marr

    November 16, 2016

    What happens when a Mancunian music god comes home to celebrate the launch of his life story? Our blogger Adam Farrer finds out. The Royal Northern College of Music became a church tonight; the audience, a congregation. While this building is no stranger to hosting revered musical figures, Johnny Marr, legendary guitarist and songwriter with The […]

  • Young Digital Reporter Review: Susan Calman

    November 8, 2016

    ‘I kind of forgot that anyone would actually read it’: Young Digital Reporter Bryony Makin reports on our recent event with author and comedian Susan Calman. ‘If I become upset,’ Susan Calman warned the audience before her conversation with host Viv Groskop, ‘I’m fine. You don’t need to feel bad’. Which put a finger on […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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, […]

  • Young Digital Reporter Review: The Good Immigrant

    October 31, 2016

    Our blogger Melissa Brakel reports from Gorilla, where Himesh Patel, Miss L, Inua Ellams and Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant, performed some of their powerful and funny essays from the book. ‘Is this for The Good Immigrant?’ I’m dubious, standing in a queue beneath the railway arches. It feels as though I’m going […]