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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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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Review: Afternoon Tea with Jane Rogers
October 20, 2016
Festival blogger Sarah Butler headed to The Midland Hotel to hear Jane Rogers read and discuss the new short story, ‘Haunting’, commissioned as part of her residency at the hotel. What’s not to like? Listening to a new short story by writer Jane Rogers in the sumptuous setting of the Midland Hotel’s Wyvern Suite, followed by […]
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Review: Afternoon Tea With Kate Clanchy
November 6, 2015
Sarah Jasmon enjoys an afternoon story – and cake – with Midland writer in residence Kate Clanchy. Kate Clanchy is wearing a coat-dress made in a fine grey suit fabric with a collar and tie. With her cropped hair and glasses, she has the air of a Bloomsbury bluestocking, which feels just right for the Edwardian […]
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Review: The Letters Page
November 6, 2015
Sarah-Clare Conlon hears about a literary journal that’s really pushing the envelope – The Letters Page, edited by novelist and short story writer Jon McGregor I was going to tell you all about the amazing venue that is Elizabeth Gaskell’s House; how me and Fat Roland set up ideas of parties in the posh dining […]
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Review: Adam Marek and Diao Dou
October 22, 2015
Young Digital Reporter Calla Randall learns that surrealism is a game with rules to follow – and occasionally break – at a jolly afternoon with writers Adam Marek and Diao Dou AIDS and the Black Death still exist. There are treatments for both, but no cure yet for AIDS. In one of my favourite Adam Marek stories set at […]
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Q&A: Mai Al-Nakib
September 30, 2015
Kuwaiti writer Mai Al-Nakib‘s first book, the short story collection The Hidden Light of Objects is unforgettable. Imbued with a sense of childlike wonder and a vivid immediacy, the stories seek out the places where everyday life intersects with the unconscious and linger there. The book won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2014 First Book […]
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Q&A: Stuart Evers
September 23, 2015
Stuart Evers‘ first short story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award and was praised in The Irish Times as ‘touching, true and shocking. Here is a book that not only makes more sense of life, it delights the mind’. His novel, If This is Home, was published in 2012 to great […]