MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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Review: Sungju Lee
October 21, 2016
Festival blogger Amy McCauley headed to Central Library to hear Sungju Lee read and discuss his memoir, co-written by author and journalist Susan Elizabeth McClellan, Every Falling Star. What do we imagine when we think of North Korea? Perhaps a chubby cartoon of Kim Jong-Un astride a nuclear missile; or a ‘Team America’ style caricature of Kim Jong-Il […]
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Review: Olivia Laing
October 21, 2016
‘People have lived with shame and isolation, and have succeeded, and we need to be reminded of that’: Our blogger Natalie Kane reports on our recent in-conversation event with Olivia Laing. As Manchester is falling headfirst into autumn, into darker hours with emptier trees, a warm shuffle of coated people make their way into Anthony […]
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Q&A: Horatio Clare
October 13, 2016
Horatio Clare is an author and journalist. He has written two memoirs, the Somerset Maugham Award-winning Running for the Hills and Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope, as well as two works of travel and nature writing. His latest book, Orison for A Curlew, a combination of travel and nature writing, was released in 2015. […]
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Q&A: Garth Greenwell
September 23, 2016
Garth Greenwell‘s debut novel What Belongs to You has created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, and was recently shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award. A beautifully written book about desire and its consequences, it tracks the complicated relationship between an American teacher […]
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Review: Yuval Noah Harari
September 19, 2016
Is human equality a notion that is approaching its sell-by date? MLF blogger Holly Aszkenasy reports back from our recent event with Sapiens and Homo Deus author Yuval Noah Harari. In his best-selling Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari took us on a grand tour of humankind, beginning with the violent overrun of planet Earth by […]
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Review: Helen Macdonald and Jeanette Winterson
March 29, 2016
“It’s always about quality of attention”: MLF’s Kate Feld reports on our recent in-conversation event with Jeanette Winterson and Helen Macdonald, which featured compelling insights into Macdonald’s hit memoir as well as inspiring talk on the writer’s craft. A meeting of two such multi-faceted and curious minds as Jeanette Winterson and Helen Macdonald is a rare treat, and our event with the Centre […]
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Review: Paul Mason
November 6, 2015
Louise Bolotin is spellbound by an evening with the brilliant Paul Mason. Paul Mason is familiar to many as Channel 4 News’ economics editor, and to the musically minded as a Northern Soul aficionado, but it was in his journalistic capacity that he took to the stage to expound on his theories about the future […]
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Review: Simon Armitage
November 6, 2015
Young Digital Reporter Elizabeth Gibson is thrilled by a first encounter with one of her favourite poets. I have long been a fan of Simon Armitage: his poem “Homecoming” is one of my absolute favourites. So it was with great excitement that I sat down in the Central Library to see him for the first […]
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Review: Tracey Thorn and Dave Haslam
October 25, 2015
Desmond Bullen revisits ‘days of hormone and heartbreak’ as Tracey Thorn and Dave Haslam share a few of their favourite songs for Jukebox Choice. This – thank heavens – isn’t ‘rock and roll’, yet Gorilla’s decommissioned nuclear bunker décor has just the same conjured up a gig-giddiness amongst its midlife critics, all sensible clothes and […]
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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 […]