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MLF Chapter & VerseMLF Chapter & Verse

The Manchester Literature Festival Blog

  • 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, […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 Zadie Smith

    December 9, 2016

    Our Young Digital Reporter Laura Cooper reports from a wonderful evening of literature and conversation with Zadie Smith Having already appeared at events in Cambridge and London, Zadie Smith paid a visit to Manchester Central Library on 24th November for a conversation with Katie Popperwell to bookend the 2016 Manchester Literature Festival. She was here to […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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. […]

  • 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 […]