MLF Chapter & Verse
The Manchester Literature Festival Blog
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MLF at Home: Cathy on Poetry
May 19, 2020
Next in our MLF At Home series, Festival Co-Director Cathy Bolton shares some of her all-time favourite collections from her poetry shelves. Like classic albums, these collections are more than just random sets of lyrics thrown together – the poems speak to & enrich each other, but I’ve picked out some personal hits to give […]
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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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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 […]
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Q&A: Michael Symmons Roberts
August 29, 2017
Michael Symmons Roberts launches his seventh collection of poetry, Mancunia, at this year’s Manchester Literature Festival, where he – and others – will perform these new poems of the city. Michael’s six previous collections, including Drysalter and Corpus have been awarded the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. He has […]
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Q&A: Raymond Antrobus
August 22, 2017
Poet Raymond Antrobus starts off our series of interviews with writers appearing in this year’s Festival. He is a British-Jamiacan poet, performer and educator who has published the chapbooks Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus (Burning Eye Books) and To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press) and co-curates the London spoken word poetry show Chill Pill. He […]
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Review: Sarah Howe
November 8, 2016
MLF blogger Amy McCauley attends our event with poet Sarah Howe, where she finds a robust poetics ‘brimming with questions’ alongside ‘a refusal to offer easy answers’. The question of voices and inheritances – cultural, social, historical and familial – travels across Sarah Howe’s work, and her astonishing performance at the Anthony Burgess Foundation confirms […]
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Review: Jean Sprackland
November 8, 2016
Our blogger Rebecca Hurst reports from Hope Mill Theatre, where Jean Sprackland, winner of the Costa Poetry Award, presented a new sequence of poems, Lock Songs, inspired by a boating weekend along the Peak Forest Canal. On Sunday 23 October I made my way through crowds of Manchester City supporters to Hope Mill Theatre in […]
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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: An Evening With Jackie Kay
October 21, 2016
“The business of being a writer and a reader is like a call and response – it’s like the blues. You throw something out and then stories come back to you.”: Our blogger Abi Hynes is thrilled by Jackie Kay’s writing. I don’t know what I was expecting from my first in-real-life encounter with poet, author, […]