Manchester Literature Festival Blog

Bookend 2

2011-11-15T14:48:00.001Z

Close Up With Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot, Sunday 6th November, 7.30pm, Whitworth Art Gallery

Words by Zoe Lambert. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

About 150 of us are sitting in rows in the South Gallery, and with Jeffrey Eugenides standing at a lectern, we could be in a lecture in The Marriage Plot. But we aren’t. We are at the final MLF event, which is also one of Dave Haslam’s Close Up interviews.

Eugenides introduces his third novel, The Marriage Plot, by recounting how, just a few minutes ago, a "young journalist" had interviewed him for Creative Times told him that in a seminar in critical theory she’d sent romantic notes to someone in the class, using quotations from Roland Barthes' A Lovers’ Discourse. I glance at the "young journalist", who is sitting next to me in the audience; she is hiding under her hair.

At the beginning of the novel the "heroine", Madeleine - a devotee of 19th-century fiction - is attending a course on semiotics and writing a paper on Barthes’ A Lovers’ Discourse, while falling in love with another student, Leonard. Is this life copying art or art into life? Or being written by the discourse of love? In any case, Eugenides reads the section about Madeleine and Leonard falling in love, and ends with the moment when she announces she loves him, only to have Leonard force her read from A Lovers’ Discourse: "Once the first avowel has been made, 'I love you' has no meaning whatsoever."

Jeffrey Eugenides is an excellent reader. We could have listened to him for hours, possibly days, but with Madeleine throwing A Lovers’ Discourse at Leonard’s head, he closes the book and sits down on the chair next to Dave Haslam. Dave doesn’t ask about writing love stories, plots or semiotics. He goes straight to what audiences always want to know about: the practicalities of writing. Eugenides reveals that he writes every day from 10 til dinnertime; you can’t wait for inspiration. The secret, and this is what we are waiting for, is growing the flesh on your backside you need to develop to become a scholar. Is it hard to sustain the tone while writing a novel, asks Haslam. Sustaining it is easy. It’s finding the tone that’s hard. Are there any obstacles? Eugenides’ main obstacle is finishing his novels (on average 10 years). In fact, his editor flew to Berlin in order to take Middlesex away. (I imagine the editor prowling around his apartment, saying, Just tell me where the manuscript is, Jeff.) That’s another thing about Eugenides; he’s a great raconteur, full of anecdotes.

Dave Haslam asks the question no writer wants to answer: is there a lot of your own experience in the novel? Eugenides admits that when he was writing a lot of his memories of college life came back. But, interestingly, the section that "dovetailed" with his own experience was also the most difficult to write (he’d been trying to write about it for 30 years). Like the character Mitchell, he’d travelled around Europe and spent time in Calcutta, but the chapter about this ended up an "ungodly mess" and he had to cut away a lot of his autobiography in order to find the story.

Though the novel is about how to write the 19th-century marriage plot in the 21st century, aren’t things different now, with mobiles, the internet and so forth, to in the 80s? Nope. Nothing has changed. Whether you are waiting for a letter, staying in for a phone call or checking your mobile for a text, the "tumult of anxiety" (Barthes' words) of waiting has not changed. Too true, we all think. Too true.

Dave Haslam moves on to The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. Was adolescence a fertile time for writing? Yes, he is slowly growing up. Is the "obscure object" in Middlesex from his personal experience? The term comes from a beautiful and mysterious art history major Eugenides and his friends admired at college. They called her "the obscure object" (from Bunuel’s That Obscure Object Of Desire). The day he finished his novel he went for dinner in Berlin and there she was, the obscure object in the flesh. Recently, she turned up at a reading in Toronto with her mother and fiancé.

It’s the audience’s turn. No one says anything for a minute, then a hand goes up: do you put limits on yourself as a writer? Yes, as a young writer limiting his options in The Virgin Suicides made it easier. But his latest novel grew more naturally. He wanted it to be a tightly dramatised book and to explore the characters as deeply as possible. The audience warms up and the questions come thick and fast. What about his next book? Same tone, says Eugenides. Wider canvas. Is Leonard based on David Foster Wallace? Not at all. He didn’t know Wallace when he was writing the character. The best question of the night: do you believe in semiotics or in love? Eugenides says he sits on the fence. He’d like to emancipate himself from delusions but still wants to believe in love. He has been influenced by semiotics, but resisted deconstruction; he still believes a text can convey meaning, and in that way he still believes in love. With the final question, he tells us Middlesex is going to be made into a mini-series by HBO.

We file into the next room for the book signing. Perhaps our "young journalist" and the story of her Barthian love letters will tour with Eugenides in his bank of brilliant anecdotes.

Zoe Lambert is the author of The War Tour, out now on Comma Press.

Bookend 1

2011-11-15T11:15:00.010Z

Anthony Horowitz's Sherlock Holmes: The House Of Silk, Thursday 3rd November, 7pm, Banqueting Hall, Manchester Town Hall

Words by Simon Savidge. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

The setting for Manchester Literature Festival's first ‘bookend’ event couldn’t be more apt. Could there be anywhere more perfect for discussing all things Sherlock Holmes on a dark autumn evening than Manchester Town Hall - one of Manchester’s most gothic Victorian buildings and used in Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of Sherlock on the big screen as the Houses of Parliament. No, it’s true, honest. We are here tonight to see Anthony Horowitz, interviewed by one of the Festival’s patrons, Jenni Murray. He's discussing his career but in particular his latest novel, The House Of Silk, which - with the backing of the Conan Doyle estate - sees Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick Dr Watson emerge once more from the fog of Victorian London.

Horowitz starts the event with a reading of the introduction, and (if you're like me rather a fan of Sherlock Holmes, you needn’t be worried) you are instantly drawn straight back into 221B Baker Street; his voice is so close to Arthur Conan Doyle's. When he ends, the packed Banqueting Hall explodes with applause, but everyone soon goes quiet as they put the famous voice of Radio 4's Woman’s Hour to the face of Jenni Murray. She opens the conversation with Anthony by asking why he felt he could write as Conan Doyle. “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think I could carry it of, for I am a huge fan, and in fact I had to write five pages first just to give it a go”, comes the reply, and the game is afoot.

Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s legacy makes up the first part of the discussion. Horowitz believes the fascination behind them is simply down to "friendship - we all want a best friend like Watson and a best friend like Holmes, it's that simple, and so we want to spend time with them as I always did and continue to do". Horowitz freely admits he did this project because he thought it would "be fun" and "had the story in about 45 minutes of knowing I was doing it", before telling us that there won't be a second Horowitz and Holmes outing because he has "used all the best stuff with this one, and a second would be cynical". Some authors could come off as arrogant with statements like that, but there is something slightly innocent and simply honest in Horowitz’s discussion - a certain open frankness which makes you wonder if that is what calls out to his younger fans.

In fact many of these surround him in the audience (indeed my 12-year-old cousin had begged to come along), and it's nice to see such a mix of young and old. When Horowitz discusses the ending of the Alex Rider series and why as he goes forward as an author - especially now his sons have grown up - the children’s books might slow down, one of the older fans says, "You gave me my childhood escapism - can you please keep doing it for my adulthood too?" It is when the audience gets involved and all the children start asking questions that the event opens up and a less serious side of Horowitz emerges and the author in fact almost lights up. I'm left fairly sure there will be no end to the children’s novels for quite some time yet as they provided such a captive and entertaining audience for the author, it seems.

There is also much laughter when Jenni Murray brings up his TV work, firstly the incredibly successful Foyle’s War and then Midsomer Murders and why Horowitz left. A wry smile appears as he tells the audience: "I had killed everyone off, in fact in my last episode I managed to kill two people off between every ad break, it seemed a little much." It's a question about TV that ends the evening as Murray asks who Horowitz would love to play Holmes and Watson should The House Of Silk be adapted. He thinks about and says: "My ideal pairing would be Daniel Day Lewis as Holmes… and Kenneth Brannagh as Watson - I think that could be the perfect duo." And from the sound of the audience, I think we are all agreed.

You can hear a Sherlock Special plus Manchester Literature Festival Special podcast on Simon's blog The Readers: click here.

Simon Savidge is a freelance editor and journalist, he blogs about all things bookish at Savidge Reads. He is also co-host of Manchester's Bookmarked Literary Salon, co-host of The Readers podcast and co-founder of the Green Carnation Prize. You can follow him on Twitter via @SavidgeReads.

Two for one tales

2011-11-03T13:00:00.000Z

Words by Nazia Bashir. Photographs by Jon Atkin.

Review 1: Family Storytelling: Margaret Ryan, Saturday 15th October, 12 noon, Children's Department, Waterstone's Deansgate

It's stories galore on this warm October afternoon in the Children’s Department of Waterstone’s Deansgate, with books almost jumping at you from every wall; setting the right atmosphere for what is to be a fun and lively event. On entrance we are warmly welcomed by Margaret Ryan’s brightly lit smile as she sits comfortably behind a display of her recent works, which families are circling around. I manage to have a quick conversation with Margaret. Previously a primary school teacher, Margaret tells me she gave up teaching to become a children’s author. Writing is a hobby which “grew and grew”, she explains, till she decided to take it up as her main profession.

Now, as the carpet space fills up, Margaret gets ready to address her enthusiastic family gathering of children and parents alike. Some are sat cross-legged on the soft purple carpet, while a few are gathered around the table. Margaret begins by taking us through her journey and process as a children’s author. So how do ideas enter an author’s mind? Carefully taking off her glasses, Margaret remembers how a random conversation about pet names with a colleague intrigued her to write the Fat Alphie And Charlie The Wimp series. She found that her colleague’s pet names had something very “magical” about them which would appeal to children.

Margaret now presents us with a lively animated reading of Fat Alphie In Love. Brilliantly, she shifts her voice from a high-pitched singing tone to a low and gentle voice. Enthusiastically, the families join in together and the momentum picks up with the repeated sighs; everyone takes in a deep breath before Margaret reads the next line, “I’m in love with Lola!” Together everyone lets out a loud "sighhhhhh"! Noticeably, we are all warmed up and it is clear that repetition is a useful tool for children’s stories, especially for a bit of family storytelling fun; bringing everyone together. But before Margaret moves on to her next reading, a puzzled-looking lady impatiently asks, “Excuse me: does he get Lola in the end?” Left on a cliff-hanger, we are asked to read the rest to find out.

I’m sure we all must remember the familiar family story ”There were 10 in the bed and the little one said: roll over...” This is the idea for Margaret’s The Littlest Dragon series. The Littlest Dragon is the youngest in a family of 10 dragon brothers and they all sleep in one big dragon bed. However, the littlest dragon wants to get rid of the other nine dragons so he can have the bed to himself. Margaret explains this series, with a familiar family theme, is aimed at beginner readers.

Next, with the help of the lively audience, Margaret presents her most prominent work Roodica The Rude And The Famous Flea Trick. This is one of Margaret’s first books to be selected in 2011 for the Richard and Judy Children’s Book Club. As roles are allocated to both parents and children from the audience, it is clear that Margret has prepared for the fun element of her visit. She has even gone the extra mile by bringing in clothes and props to help dress up and bring to life each of the characters in her story.

The question and answer session that follows further explores Margaret’s journey as a children’s author. First question: how long does it take to get an idea transformed into a book? “It ranges from five to six weeks to a few months.” For instance, her Weird Street series was instigated while waiting at traffic lights. Margaret noticed the name Weird Street, consequently, her creative mind began exploring and questioning; who lives in Weird Street? Next: what is your favourite book? “That is a hard question because you end up liking all the characters including the baddies.” However, Margaret is fond of her Canterbury Tales series as they are personal stories which relate to her own children.

Clearly there are many joys of being a children's author; enabling her to write and still be involved with children. Margaret has also just finished her first book for adults. The event comes to an official end as the audience gives a big round of applause. What a great fun event, leaving us all smiling with fond childhood memories. As families we depart, taking away fun reading ideas, I also feel inspired: to take back some fresh ideas into the classroom.

Review 2: Children's Bookshow: Kevin Crossley-Holland, Friday 21st October, 10.30am, Royal Exchange Theatre

There is a real sense of excitement as I arrive on a cool, clear October morning at the remarkable Royal Exchange. Children liven up the atmosphere as they scurry around in their red, green and blue school uniforms while enthusiastic teachers frantically direct them towards the theatre entrance.

As we settle into our seats, the lights dim and it’s so hushed you can almost hear a pin drop. Under the spotlight, the stage is set with what resembles a comfy lounge: we have a brown leather sofa next to a side table with a small pile of books spread across.

“Life is long and time is short,” begins Kevin Crossley-Holland, one of the UK’s most acclaimed children’s authors, in his reflective tone.

At the age of 70, Kevin has many stories to tell and retell as he explains the three stepping stones that led to him becoming a writer: “Moments that are key minutes in your life that bring me here to you.”

He admits he had never read a book until he was 11 years old. But it was an “electrifying” Saracen shield that transformed him to tune into his senses, allowing the object to tell him a story. The second stepping stone, which actually took Kevin by surprise, was an old pot he chose to keep in memory of his grandfather, only to later discover that it was a unique hidden treasure, a missing Anglo Saxon piece. Kevin’s passion to learn and speak Latin while studying at Oxford University directed him to his third stepping stone. In his own words, Kevin describes the sound of the Anglo Saxon language - “Like waves running up a stony beach” - making him fall in love with Anglo Saxon writing.

Kevin, a natural storyteller, sheds some light on his career journey. He steadily gives details about how he sacrificed his publishing job to camp in Iceland. This journey inspired him to spend the next four years writing and retelling the Viking myths. As each story unfolds and another one begins, Kevin takes us through a visual journey presented using a slideshow of images from Norway and Turkey. The faint background music further enables the audience to capture his imagination. Captivated by the image of the Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul, formerly a masjid and church, Kevin explains how this visit inspired him to write his recent novel Bracelet Of Bones. During this visit he saw a carving of Viking runes leading him to write the story of Solveig, a Viking girl who makes her journey from Norway to Turkey.

Kevin now gives an avid reading from a passage in Bracelet Of Bones. His voice and calm manner leave the audience spellbound. It is amazing to see how the children, some astonished and some eyes glued to the centre spotlight, are all magically listening.

Kevin ends the event with some wise words of encouragement, “If you can make music with words and pictures with words, you can write!” He further adds that he will keep on writing stories: “I’ll never stop but I’ll be stopped by old age.”

Kevin is a truly extraordinary storyteller with a difference and The Children’s Bookshow presents a truly entertaining event. I leave comprehending that everything and everyone has got a deep hidden treasure - full of stories.

Nazia Bashir is a teacher of English in Lancashire with a keen interest in exploring diverse cultures. She also blogged for Manchester Literature Festival 2010.

Fair to Midland

2011-11-01T14:32:00.001Z

Midland Hotel: Fact & Fiction

Review 1: Fact
Memories Of The Midland Tour With Barbara Frost, Wednesday 19th October, 1pm

Words by Hayley Flynn.

Today's tour of the Midland is held by historian and author Barbara Frost, who's been taking people around this grand building since 1987 and has picked up an interesting tale or two over the years. We meet in the foyer, formerly the Winter Gardens, just beyond the two archways out front that were designed for horses and carriages so that they could deposit their passengers inside the hotel without them ever seeing a drop of local rain. It's easy to be swept up in the historical grandeur of this hotel, imagining as we're guided around touches from the past such as the live orchestra which sat where we now have reception desks.

Built by Midland Railway Company in 1880 in reaction to a rather peevish public who couldn't bear having to walk all the way from the Manchester Central station to Piccadilly in order to find a decent hotel. The erection of the hotel meant that five buildings were demolished, one of which was a gentleman's concert hall where Charles Halle began his career and Chopin gave his very last performance. A condition, therefore, was imposed that the hotel must build a concert hall within its walls. On-site entertainment, a coal fire and telephone in every room, it was all very luxurious - if you forget for a moment that back then guests shared bathrooms.

Although now owned by Q Hotels, there is evidence everywhere of the Midland Railway Company, most notably in the Wyvern. This restaurant is named after a mythical dragon and there is a Wyvern room in every hotel built by the company. Take some time to have a look at the photographs here; they're by Eadweard Muybridge, a man fascinated by the movement of the horse trot. He captured sequential photographs that could be animated much like a flip book and his work here is of the human motion and adorns every wall of the restaurant. Immediately outside the Wyvern the artwork takes a literary turn; extracts from W H Auden's poem Night Mail can be found framed in several locations on the ground floor and serve as a reminder of the mail trains that would have rattled by the hotel. Continuing the theme, the Alexandra ballroom contains plastercast replicas of the building's exterior carvings, including ones of Shakespeare.

In the Trafford Room we learn that the tango was danced here for the very first time in the UK, most likely by film star and gangster George Raft who taught the king and queen a little while later in London. Passing by the Moorish Octagon Room, we move into the French restaurant (pictured), where the Beckhams had their first date and Coronation Street characters Hilda and Stanley Ogden celebrated their silver anniversary.

The hotel is a maze of reading rooms, barber shops, tea rooms, ladies' meeting rooms, basements and sub-basements. Every need is catered for, except, in the beginning, those of the stomach. Architect Charles Trubshaw, a man who clearly had his every meal cooked for him, didn't even consider the need for a kitchen until the last minute and as such they were originally located in a basement level as an afterthought.

Down in the basement, the gym as we know it today, a German restaurant could be found. The original entrance is beautifully covered in Bermantoft tiles which were plastered over during the war to protect them - ironically it was the removal of the plaster and not the war that led to the damaged state they are in today. A waiter working in the restaurant, Hugo, fell in love and proposed to a co-worker named Alice Bradley. The war arrived in England and German Hugo was sent to the Isle of Mann from where he would never return. Alice didn't give up on Hugo and travelled to Germany to trace his family, which she managed to do and found Hugo alive and well, and married to another woman.

Room 247 on the second floor is the home of the Presidential Suite, where the likes of Pavarotti and Princess Anne have stayed; travel two floors up and the suite here has seen such guests as David Cameron. Keep travelling up and you'll find a room that no longer exists. The roof of the Midland was once a garden where guests could take their afternoon teas - Barbara shows the group a photo of an old garden party and it looks as refined and pretty as any party can when located amidst the billowing smoke of the chimney pots! Still, it was elegant enough to host the wedding of Rebecca Marks (Marks and Spencer) in 1910. Look up now and you'll still spot the ornate, white iron fence that surrounded the garden.

Hayley Flynn won Best City And Neighbourhood Blog in the Manchester Blog Awards 2011 for her site, which features the regular Skyliner series, looking at "the secrets above your eyeline".

Review 2: Fiction
Afternoon Tea With Patricia Duncker, French Restaurant, Midland Hotel, Wednesday 19th October, 3pm

Words by Sarah-Clare Conlon.

Hearing from Hayley that the second floor of the Midland is home to the Presidential Suite and has hosted guests of somewhat high standing is most interesting: it provides a certain context to author Patricia Duncker choosing to use it for the room inhabited, albeit briefly, by the main character in her specially commissioned short story.

The Madonna At The Midland opens with the rather posh Clarissa Dalloway (yes, the nod to Virginia Woolf is intentional) "cuddling a headache" as she faces the prospect of seeing in her 70th birthday alone in a strange second-floor suite overlooking the rain-drenched Central Library, gazing into "the long sigh of old age ahead". Patricia and Barbara explain to me that Clarissa's suite is located above the conference rooms, which serves to link her back to the public spaces in the hotel, where she spends much of the action, aghast yet also enchanted.

In her introduction, Patricia tells the well-turned-out audience filling the sumptuous, gilded French how, during her four- or five-month spell as writer-in-residence (though she didn't actually live at the Midland), she became intrigued by the inner or personal parts and the outer or shared parts any hotel has. "Hotels are not only very theatrical places," she explains, "they are also quite curiously interlinked - private space and public space. That private space and public space is what interested me the most."

To get a proper feel for the Midland, Patricia was pretty much given the run of the place - "I do declare myself to the duty manager when I start one of my secret raids on the hotel," she says with a good-humoured cluck, something of a trademark. "I have an upstairs as well as a downstairs knowledge of the Midland." Historian Barbara was also drafted in to offer Patricia an insight into the background and gossip from the building and its guests, helping her imagine the story she was gradually beginning to unfold and relating it back to the very specific location.

As well as making particular references in her story to the public spaces of the Wyvern, the French and "the strangely Oriental space of the Octagon", much of the action takes place in the lift and the lobby, where Clarissa finds herself "walled in by smiles" as a hubbub of people, all in fancy dress, are gathering for a birthday party. The guests are "supposed to come dressed up as famous people who stayed at the Midland", and indeed we have Hayley's aforementioned Pavarotti, Posh and Becks, and, perhaps not David Cameron, but his predecessors Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Knowing what Barbara knows has added an extra depth to Patricia's story of the reunion of two old friends; already a well-written, well-paced and well-received story. Time for tea.

The Madonna At The Midland will be available shortly to read on the MLF website.

Sarah-Clare Conlon is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. Her award-winning blog, Words & Fixtures, is about language, literature, arts and culture.

Moved by the Breeze

2011-10-27T13:21:00.000+01:00

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Saturday 22nd October, workshop 3pm; performance 7.30pm, Contact

Workshop: Words by Shaaheda Patel. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

On a Saturday afternoon, Oxford Road’s vibrant Contact theatre is the venue for today’s meeting of dynamic, young writers, waiting to be coached by acclaimed Caribbean poet Jean "Binta" Breeze.

The oranges and purples, running parallel to the striking urban artwork on our entrance, reflects the diversity of our motley group. We are led into a slow-moving mirrored lift, to an upper floor. The chirpy yellow room is already occupied by a small table in the centre; seats are filled.

I sit to the left of Jean; she is beaming and welcomes us in.

White plates of chocolate biscuits are on offer, sugary stimulants for the writing process ahead. We have intimacy and arm space, as two Young Identity members arrive and the door is closed. Part of the writing development organisation Commonword, Young Identity supports teenagers and young adults by using poetry, prose and performance to expose young people’s issues.

Jean begins with some warm-up activities. She introduces herself as Jean, a poet who had Alpen for breakfast. We are subsequently asked to introduce ourselves in the same way but are challenged to build up the list of names and breakfasts as we circle the table. It turns out that I am accompanied by a first-time writer, some accomplished poets, a young poet who had frankfurters on baps for breakfast and this year’s Superhero Of Slam poetry winner.

Jean now gives us five minutes to carry out some free writing. We are asked to write in detail about everything that we have done in our day so far. I find myself jotting down intimate details of my husband, as he finally sweeps a dying bee off the floor that had inconvenienced us by lying there dying for two long days already. The writer next to me whispers that she finds this exposing and I find myself agreeing.

Commenting on one writer’s smoking habits, Jean tells us that she was once a chain smoker, and only the risk of a brain haemorrhage has now slowed her down. Her day would normally have read, “Coffee, 16 cigarettes, coffee, 10 cigarettes…”

Jean now introduces the difference between the concrete and the abstract and our next task is to use only the concrete to describe the more convoluted abstract. We choose an abstract noun each and begin the process. I choose Imagination.

Jean starts by asking a series of questions to evoke the senses and we are silent in this large yellow room and only the scribbling of Biros is heard. “If you walked in on your abstract, what would it be doing?” She asks as her final question. Immediately I see Imagination spinning, neat and orderly: “Chaos contained through movement,” I write.

To recharge, Jean points us towards the green room and on return we re-read and redraft our poems in silence.

Jean asks us to share what we have written. We hear of “boiled tripe in bleach”, and “stray strands of silky black refusing tidy pony tails”, triggering animated discussions of grief, integrity and indifference.

Our time with Jean has ended.

Jean talks about perspectives and tells us as we sit in silence: “We are on our own in this world. It is your world and the senses are full of wonderful things.” She discusses our frustrations as new writers and sometimes our obsessions with "getting an idea". She encourages us to trust our senses. “We are sometimes overturned by a smell, and this is how the poem becomes the idea.” She helpfully advises while pointing at the table: “Be true to the local and the concrete… that will then become true to the universal.” She ends: “Be true to the little things.”

We learn that Jean didn’t come to this point through academia and university. She has been writing since 11 and performing since the 70s. Her book of selected poems, Third World Girl, came out last month and as she leafs through it she can still see the truth. The truth transcends time.

“Write with honesty,” she pleads. And with that thought we leave on this Saturday afternoon; stepping back out onto busy Oxford Road; inspired and ready to self-consciously sense again on our separate journeys home.

Shaaheda Patel is a teacher of English Language and Literature at a sixth-form college in Blackburn. She blogged for Manchester Literature Festival in 2010 and has worked on literature development projects with Time To Read.

Performance: Words by Kevin Danson. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

Tonight is a night I want to remember and tell people about for a long time. I say this not only due to a series of bicycle calamities getting to tonight’s event, involving me riding a bike which would be too small even for a six year old then pedalling like a fugitive to maintain punctuality, but also because I was given the opportunity to watch the sold-out performance of passionate and compelling Jean "Binta" Breeze. Segun Lee-French is the anchor of tonight’s Manchester Literature Festival event, jointly hosted by Renaissance One, Commonword and Speakeasy.

Launching this evening’s poetry are some members of the inspiring group Young Identity: Nicole May, Saquib Chowdhury, Yussuf M’Rabty, Reece Williams, Elmi Ali and Mike Bennett. They stand in unison as the voice of our young generation presenting pieces relating teenage struggles of romance, hesitant thoughts of an infatuated boy and difficulties of witnessing domestic violence. It isn’t all seriousness however. Nicole gives a witty piece on extremities women go to - waxing, botoxing, enhancing, clothing - in order to fit the ever-changing picture of an ideal woman. Young Identity offer free workshops every Tuesday at Contact Theatre from 7-9pm. Some of these poets perform their arts as part of Brave New Voices, representing the UK around the globe. Manchester’s where it’s at!

Three Speakeasy poets substitute the Young Identity crew and smooth the audience with their luscious voices. Between them they describe society’s judgments on our current reality vis-à-vis virtual reality (Chanje Kunda) and rap issues on politics and the global financial crisis (Yvonne McCalla and Amanda Milligan), all the while causing a respirational standstill for silent reflection. It is that quiet I could hear a feather land.

Jean "Binta" Breeze steps into the spotlight to euphoric applause. After cracking a few jokes – though this continues throughout her performance – Jean breaks into song that rolls sweetly into her first poem, Simple Things. As she finishes her Testament poem, Jean tells us of the church songs she learnt as a child in her granny’s lounge. And that is just how we all feel right now; as if we are in the lounge of Jean "Binta" Breeze and she is sharing her childhood memories. There is a certain intimacy between the audience and this captivating poet. Jean starts a song; we all join in. Jean taps her foot and we keep the beat like a human metronome. I love it when she hurtles the lyrics; "Old pirates, yes, they rob I" receiving a bursting return of the subsequent words to one of Bob Marley’s most significant songs. Her presence is like that of a church leader, admitting truths in her words above sounds of harmony and amens from her devotees.

I would never have guessed that as I sit here in Contact I would be travelling through the mountains of western Jamaica meeting stern yet entertaining grandparents and watching a small Jamaican child arrive on our foreign shores then being witness to a Caribbean wife/mother/worker’s testament. Occasionally I find myself lost under the patois yet I cling on to an identifiable word and get myself back on track.

Jean wraps up with a rhythmic poem about a Caribbean woman - however there appears to be not a chance in the world that this crowd will let her go that easily. The applause is like a thunderstorm and the fans rise to give her a full-house standing ovation. We get one more out of her, a new poem called Third World Girl, also the name of her new book. Undoubtedly one of the best colonial poems I have ever heard. With verse like "You can’t love me cos you own me / my paradise is your hotel" and "Empire’s over but the rape’s been done", my thoughts are drowned and I’m swimming in contemplation.

I arrived dizzy and out of breath, now I’m leaving in exactly the same way. Even though I have an unforgettable Nana of my own, I am happy to take on 20 more Jean "Binta" Breezes.

Kevin Danson is an English Literature student at MMU. Read his blog Pebbleddash and follow him on Twitter @pebbleddash.

The greatest love affair

2011-10-26T15:18:00.001+01:00

Antonia Fraser: On Harold Pinter, Wednesday 19th October, 7.30pm, Whitworth Art Gallery

Words by Rowena Roberts. Photograph byt Ed Swinden.

“At the dinner party, we sat at opposite ends of the table – which vexed me, as I’d been hoping to meet this man who everyone was talking about. The evening drew on and I had to leave with my friend – but before I did so, I walked over to introduce myself to him. So I said who I was, and that I unfortunately had to leave, at which he turned his extraordinary black eyes up to me and simply said: ‘Must you go?’”

Such was Lady Antonia Fraser’s account of her first meeting with the Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Harold Pinter in 1975, which she described to a crowded, yet hushed room under high white ceilings and mellow yellow lighting, in the Whitworth Art Gallery last Wednesday.

Of course, on that night in question she didn’t "go", so these first words of Harold to Antonia marked the start of a relationship that was to endure for 33 years – and inspired the title of her biography on him, published last year.

Must You Go? was written “with passion in 10 weeks”, Lady Antonia revealed, following Harold’s death in 2008. Quite a departure from her usual best-selling books on historical figures such as Mary Queen of Scots, it’s both a mourning and a celebration of the man and their life together, based on Antonia’s personal diaries.

On this evening in the Whitworth, Lady Antonia spoke to stand-in interviewer Jon Atkin (who did a sterling job at last-minute notice) about the love of her life and “one true friend”, reading extracts from the book that perfectly matched her conversational style: anecdotal and affectionate.

With a stately air and gracious demeanour, sporting a smart black-and-white floral jacket and a wicked sense of humour, Antonia revealed details of parties and playwrights; of family trips to Eastbourne; of a jolly cricketer who wrote sinister plays; of poetry penned in the intensity of passion celebrating “the breath we took when we first met”; and of the characteristically understated manner in which Harold received the news of his crowning career achievement – “I seem to have won the Nobel Prize.”

The audience Q&A also brought her other historical works into the conversation, allowing Antonia to touch on her forthcoming work, a book on the Great Reform Bill, for which she was visiting Manchester’s People's History Museum the following day.

But, as Pinter’s plays reveal, emotions can sometimes best be glimpsed in throwaway lines – such as Antonia’s quiet, matter-of-fact admission towards the close of our discussion: “I can’t read the end of my book – and I wrote it.”

That sense of enduring love and incredible passion, bubbling below the surface of a literary discussion, is what I’ll remember most from this evening with Antonia Fraser.

Rowena Roberts is a copywriter, editor and journalist based in south Manchester. You can see more on her website.

Brain drain

2011-10-26T12:39:00.001+01:00

Literary Quiz with James Walton, Sunday 23rd October, 7.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Kevin Danson.

On another weirdly warm October night, the doors are closed and curtains drawn in the IABF as teams cluster around tables for this year’s Manchester Literature Festival quiz night with writer and host of BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff James Walton, also author of the handy literary quiz book, Sonnets, Bonnets & Bennetts. James is the creator of this year’s quiz, made up of six rounds with 10 questions each and random bonus questions thrown in. On top of that, he torments us with an occasional twist in certain rounds when giving the answers.

Each round has a theme; bestsellers, food and drink, sport and the like. We sit, anxiously waiting to show our literary knowledge to one another and maybe even shock ourselves. In all honesty, from round one I discover my choice of literature has been entirely off the mark, except of course for the Twilight series - worth one question. My team appears to be better equipped than I, though silence and frozen stares tell me they too may soon collide with the same brick wall I have.

Q. Which current bestseller opens July 15th 1988?
Many of the teams scribble immediately onto the sheet of paper. I on the other hand admire the renovated building I am sitting in and the pieces of antique furniture scattered about the room. With the difficulty of the questions comes an amplified volume of oooooooos and aaaaaaaaaas. These people love a challenge, forcing their minds to dig deep within those chests and vaults kept at the back of their thinkers. I will have to empty mine out and start again.

Q. Who wrote the short story; The Loneliness Of A Long Distance Runner?
My team is wide-eyed. A small team of two young ladies appears unabashed as the questions are read. In the third round a helpful twist comes to our aid; the final letter of an answer will be the start of the next answer. This seems to work in our favour at the beginning, then we go back to our standard inter-gawking. I’m trying to decipher lip movements from the team at the other end of our table but alas, I have yet to acquire this skill. I have a clear view of one of this year’s Manchester Blog Awards’ winners, Benjamin Judge, but he’s speaking tight-lipped. Does he know what I’m trying to do?

The 1960s rock band Steppenwolf was named after a novel by which author?
As the rounds progress the pressure multiplies the number of empty bottles on top of tables. The last round brings with it the harshest rules of the night, received with grumbles and shifting chairs; If you get any answers wrong, including the bonuses, you lose the points for the whole round. Nonetheless, James does let us leave a blank if we are unsure. The teams release their breath.

Q. Who wrote the novel The Sporting Life?
Q. Which novel contains the characters Dr Slop and Yorick?
Q. Whose second novel was called Human Croquet?

So many varied questions and, fortunately, so many well-read partakers to tackle them. The final round ends and the judges huddle into their corner to add up for the grand finale. I am pleased to say we didn’t come last, though very, very close.

The final four are as follows:
4th – joint position from teams James Draper and The Iliterati
3rd – The Lancs Team
2nd – Five And A Baby
And, for a second year running, first place is awarded to brainboxes The Librarians. They are presented with a bottle of champers and copies of Claire Tomalin’s biography, Charles Dickens: A Life.

Even though I leave perplexed from the amount of catch-up reading I have to do from now on, it has been a very fun night and I have had the pleasure of meeting the extremely delightful Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Hungry, The Stars And Everything and the spellbinding Zoe Lambert, author of The War Tour. A lovely end to an evening and to this year’s Manchester Literature Festival. Well done to all who took part!

Kevin Danson is an English Literature student at MMU. Read his blog Pebbleddash and follow him on Twitter @pebbleddash.

Norse code

2011-10-26T12:22:00.001+01:00

Francesca Simon: The Sleeping Army, Sunday 23rd October, 5pm, Whitworth Art Gallery

Literature blogger Ann Giles has written about this event on Bookwitch. Read the piece here.

A truly global feel

2011-10-26T12:18:00.003+01:00

International Prize For Arabic Fiction Discussion, Sunday 23rd October, 1pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Manchester-based arts and culture journalist Ben East has written about this event for The National. Read his article here.

Chloe is gone, long live Gerry

2011-10-26T12:03:00.002+01:00

The Men Pomes: Gerry Potter, Friday 21st October, 7.30pm, Contact

Words by Daniel Carpenter.

The first thing you hear is the thump, thump of a walking stick. It echoes across the room and from the corner, he enters. A cloaked figure, stomping his way to the microphone. Once he shuffles on stage, he casts aside the cloak and stick and grasps the microphone tight.

If there’s one thing to say about Gerry Potter, he knows how to make an entrance. Even back when he performed as Chloe Poems, he was a powerhouse of poetry.

It’s not just his approach to the stage, it’s his presence once on there. He is warm and friendly between poems, or should that be pomes? As referenced by the title of his latest collection, The Men Pomes, we quickly learn that men don’t like to say the word poem. The poetry he performs tonight is an exploration of this idea. Delving deep into the male psyche he brings with him a combination of working-class anger, love for Liverpool and a unique voice on the poetry scene.

Poet Dominic Berry who was also in the audience said, “Queer culture really, really needs this and too few even try to do what Gerry does so stunningly.” He’s right of course; Gerry Potter is a unique talent. The climax of the first half of his set, a poem called Bashed left most of the audience in tears and is one of the finest pieces of performance poetry I have ever seen. There is an honesty to a lot of his work, and it comes across on stage, so that even when he forgets his words, or stumbles, the audience is with him every step of the way.

There was a huge turnout for the evening and a vibrant crowd. Upcoming poet Zach Roddis commented, “He was in turn funny, thought-provoking, and poignant. It was really an honest portrayal of his own life in Liverpool, nothing was altered, and that's why it stood out for me as a performance that I will never forget.” Dominic Berry continues, “My all time favourite poet used to be Chloe Poems but last night Gerry Potter well and truly killed her dead.”

Daniel Carpenter is a writer and one of the organisers of the monthly spoken word event Bad Language. He blogs at Winter Hill.

Translating ideas

2011-10-25T14:00:00.002+01:00

Zhu Wen: In Conversation With Julia Lovell, Sunday 23rd October, 4.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Adrian Slatcher.

Of China, we hear so much, but sometimes know so little. It’s why the visit of the writer and film-maker Zhu Wen to Manchester was so engrossing. Born in the late 1960s, he came to prominence in the 1990s with stories that were attempting to reflect the reality of contemporary China; a state that has changed considerably over the last 20 years. Zhu Wen’s stories have been translated into English by Julia Lovell, and this event, to celebrate a new translation of one of his stories, due to appear in a Comma anthology next year, was supported by The Confucious Institute at The University Of Manchester.

I’ve read the stories collected as I Love Dollars and there’s a freshness and a looseness to his writing that seeks to give voice to the real China. The newly translated story, from which Wen read, as the English translation was projected to his side, tells the story of a student who goes from Nanjing in the south of China, to Harbin in the north, “The frozen city beyond the great wall”. It tells of a culture clash in this vast country, where the southern student dresses inappropriately for the cold weather and is shocked by the poverty of the friend’s family with whom he stays. A diet of pickled cabbage is dealt with by outside communal latrines which are “scattered with rods of excrement and icicles of urine”. It is a classic tale of a culture clash, where the educated southerner is shocked by the grim life of his northern countrymen, and the routine violence with which men treat their women. As the extract comes to an end, the narrator sees a woman who intrigues him, and when she turns, he describes her eyes as being “colder than the January wind”.

In questions from Comma editor Ra Page and the audience after the reading, Julia Lovell contextualises three generations of Chinese writer. Those born in the two decades after the war tend to write novels about China’s recent history, while those born since Mao’s death are far more commercial, writing in genres for the market. For Lovell, Zhu Wen is one of the writers of a “sandwich” generation, more avant garde in their style, and focusing on the “hurly burly of life in China today”.

Zhu Wen was an engineer and a poet before he was a fiction writer, and, fascinatingly, no longer writes stories, instead having become an acclaimed film-maker. Explaining this transition, Wen talks of film being a “a new love affair”, and reflecting his desire to try new things.

The audience is a nice mix of Chinese and English readers, and Wen is an engaging, albeit ironic, interviewee. When asked about the difference between a novelist and a short story writer, Wen says that the novelist needs “strong and muscular buttocks”, clearly an aphorism that Lovell can’t translate exactly. She talks about the difficulty of direct translation from the Chinese in a way that will make sense to English readers – and how it has helped that writers, like Wen, have been so open to her capturing the tone and style of their work for translation into English. For Wen, the book is remade when it is translated into English, so it becomes a different book, a collaboration between writer and translator.

It was a fascinating event in a number of ways – not least, because of how Zhu Wen has always been reluctant to define himself as a writer. Lovell says that on her visits to China she speaks to younger writers about who they read, and Wen is a name that frequently crops up as an influence. Little known in the West, and no longer working in the medium, his work is well worth discovering as a gateway onto a culture that is continuing to change at speed. Lovell makes the point that though we know little of Chinese literature, Chinese writers are far more open and aware of Western literature – and events such as this help to redress the balance.

Adrian Slatcher blogs about literary matters on Art Of Fiction and writes poetry and prose. His poetry collection Extracts From Levona was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons press in 2010 and Playing Solitaire For Money is out on the Salt Modern Voices imprint from Salt Publishing.

A newsworthy novel

2011-10-25T13:29:00.003+01:00

Catherine O'Flynn, Saturday 22nd October, 6pm, Event Room, Waterstone's Deansgate

Words by Sarah Holland.

Catherine O’Flynn’s debut novel, What Was Lost, was critically acclaimed and won the prestigious First Novel prize at the Costa Book Awards in 2008. What a pity for the 20 agents and publishers who rejected it before it was printed by Tindal Street Press, a small Birmingham publisher. It was on my final year reading list at university and its natural prose, humour and engrossing mystery plot led me to pick it for an essay subject. After spending significant time scribbling my rambling thoughts and question marks on the pages of her first novel I am glad to be in the intimate Waterstone’s event room this Saturday evening, to hear her chat about her second novel, The News Where You Are.

It is evident by the sitcoms that grace our television screens regularly, the American sense of humour often differs to the British. Flynn mentions that in America her novels are placed in the mystery category, but in comedy in England. She prefers to think of her work as the latter and says that anyone expecting an intricate and gripping mystery plot would be disappointed.

Writing has come very naturally to her. When asked about how she developed her unique style she struggles to answer, seemingly embarrassed by the application of her real voice. It is a similar style to her emails and letters, she says. How easy she makes this writing malarkey sound. But, could a voice be taught and nurtured? Or does it simply exist or not, and that is that? She couldn’t say, except that she finds the notion of "finding" a voice an "over-mystification". She uses her natural voice, but other writers create a more heightened prose, and that works for them.

Her second novel is about Frank, a local news reporter with a superficial "corny" persona who becomes greatly affected by the tragic stories he uncovers. She is interested in exploring the person behind the image. Local news reporters are often sneered at and viewed as ridiculous, she says. Her life experiences and interests influence her fiction. She recounts when she worked at HMV and a local reporter, who was often viewed as a bit of a joke, approached the counter with surprisingly acceptable choices to her critical musical ear. His politeness and charm seemed incongruous to his screen character and made her admire the largeness of personality required to be indifferent to the constant sniggers. Growing up, she watched a lot of local news, stories that were both funny and sad, a “strange cocktail of the surreal and the depressing”. She says that her books are basically the literary equivalent of the tragic-comic local news programmes.

The characters in her novels suffer from lost or misled ambition. I ask about her attitudes to ambition and she responds that, in a sense, she is "ambitionless". She never expected to be an author. She had many jobs before this, including a post woman and in the box office of a local arts centre. She will stop when it feels natural, she does not want to be trapped in the label of being a "writer" and churn out novels for the sake of keeping the role. Her ambitions lay in the smaller finer things, the ability to read what she liked and such. I say to her this instils an optimistic thought that, sometimes, good things can unexpectedly happen. She replies that so called "grand" ambitions are not always needed to achieve.

Catherine O’Flynn has kept her self-called ramblings succinct; she has been easy on the ear and incredibly humble when it comes to her work. I approach her with my copy of What Was Lost, and she writes in it ever so graciously, "I am sure your essay is better than the book". Oh, if only.

Sarah Holland recently graduated in English Literature from Sheffield University and now lives in Manchester. She writes about the arts and has a screen blog, Girl On Film.

Shedding light on problems

2011-10-25T13:12:00.002+01:00

Sam Willetts with Glenn Sharp & Chico Pere, Saturday 22nd October, 2.30pm, Whitworth Art Gallery

Words by Sarah Holland.

It is one of those clear, fresh October days. The white, open space of the Whitworth’s South Gallery is radiant as the sun peers through the huge windows that display Whitworth Park. The sun glistens on the green leaves, couples are sleepily lying on the grass and bicycles cycle past. It is a perfect, peaceful setting for this Poets & Players event. An afternoon filled with music and poetry? Don’t mind if I do.

Poets & Players was started in 2004 by poet Linda Chase, who passed away earlier this year, with musical director Chris Davies. This afternoon, appropriate for the setting, Sam Willets is reading from his poetry book New Light For The Old Dark, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards last year. Now, I never read poetry for pleasure. I don’t possess the patience to decipher the abstract metaphors and ambiguous meanings, hidden like a puzzle. I like stories. I like to be told things. By the end of today though, I feel a little turned.

The event commences with musicians Glenn Sharp (guitar) and Chico Pere (cante) from the group Calaita – Flamenco Son. The only movement in the gallery is the tapping of their feet and the clapping of Chico; who is looking the eclectic musician in baggy orange trousers and a bright red shirt. The guitar is beautiful and Chico’s lungs are powerful indeed. He sings with such passion that his face turns red.

Sam Willetts approaches the microphone and nervously says that he is “very unused to doing this when sober”. He was a heroin addict for over 10 years, and is now in recovery. He is shy, and trembles as he reads his first couple of poems, commenting in between that he does “feel extremely nervous”. He is normally intoxicated when giving poetry readings and it would just “breeze” by. The audience laughs.

He has a fascinating background. He mentions how his mother escaped from the Nazis and came to England as a refugee in 1947. Within three years she was reading English at Manchester University. His poetry is influenced by her experiences and his secular Jewishness. He reads his mother’s guilt-ridden survival experiences from On The Smolensk Road. He revives a visit to a Warsaw cemetery. His poems are not all darkness however, there are homesick poems dedicated to the white cliffs of Dover, and the first poem he reads is Anchor Riddle, as he has always found anchors to be beautiful.

There is a poetry break for more music from Calaita. People start to gather outside and observe through the glass, and one family decide to come in for a look. That is what is lovely about this event. It gives it a relaxed, open vibe. What a way to spend a Saturday afternoon, experiencing talent in such a lovely setting, all for free.

When Sam appears again he is sat down, water in hand and seemingly more relaxed. He reads the incredibly powerful Digging, a poem about his heroin addiction: "I'm back in a basement / heartsick, digging for a vein in February / as in a February gone and a February / still to come, spitting prayers through the tourniquet / in my teeth, licking up tears and pleading / for my blood to plume up in the barrel, please". This second part is so emotional that my eyes tinker on the edge of watering. He recites a poem about his painful separation from his girlfriend. Witnessing him read is witnessing his pain and regret. He recites a poem dedicated to regret, and the time he regrets wasting, on regret. He reads a tribute to his father that describes the time he died in hospital. He balances this compelling content with lighter love poetry, and reads the amorous Coup De Foudre, a poem he eloquently says is about “falling precipitously in love”. He says he chose that title to make it sound a bit “posher and sexier”. He starts to enjoy the reading, assuring more than once that this will be his last one, before adding during the applause "just one more". He ends with a short, surprising poem about a break-up that has the audience grinning as they applaud: “She said / Look / It’s not you / It’s me / I don’t like you."

This has been a personal highlight of MLF 2011. The combination of delicate Spanish guitars and a gifted poet with a lot to express has given the event a unique quality. I approach Sam Willets, holding a newly purchased copy of his collection, and tell him how much I enjoyed it despite not even being a poetry person. He responds that, funnily enough, he isn’t much of a poetry person either. Those that put him up for both the Forward Prize and TS Eliot prize would probably disagree with him on that one.

Sarah Holland recently graduated in English Literature from Sheffield University and now lives in Manchester. She writes about the arts and has a screen blog, Girl On Film.

Science is golden

2011-10-25T12:42:00.003+01:00

Alan Turing & Morphogenesis: Jane Rogers and Martyn Amos, Sunday 23rd October, 2pm, MadLab

Words by David Hartley. Photograph by Craig Pay.

Bringing together the forces of the Manchester Literature Festival and the Manchester Science Festival, Comma Press invited an audience to their chilly but functional headquarters at MadLab to discuss and celebrate a figure very dear to the scientific heart of Manchester. For their latest anthology, Litmus, Comma paired off a clutch of top-quality writers with a gaggle of eager scientists to produce short stories based on Eureka moments from the history of science. A quick scan of the credits in the book reveals that many of the scientists involved are currently based at a Manchester establishment, so it seemed somewhat inevitable that the irrepressible Alan Turing would get sucked in along the way.

The subject of my favourite Manchester statue (sitting on a bench in Sackville Park), Turing is as famous for his turbulent and tragic private life as he is for his scientific genius and is one of the few Manchester heroes truly worthy of the accolade. The reverent atmosphere in MadLab therefore felt entirely justified and the excellent hour-and-a-half discussion worked its way into a beautiful homage.

Litmus editor Ra Page introduces proceedings by briefly explaining the tricksy concept of Morphogenesis, the subject of the afternoon. The mind-bending complexities of how one cell expands and evolves into a intricate living creature was the focus of Turing’s last great thesis and the inspiration for Dr Martyn Amos’ suggestion as his Eureka moment for Litmus. The lucky writer who claimed this difficult but alluring topic was Jane Rogers, author of The Testament Of Jessie Lamb and recently long-listed for the Booker Prize. Tasked with not only grappling with the mind and life of a well-loved genius, but also pinning down one of his trickiest concepts, the project was evidently no mean feat.

But what a success. Rogers reads an edited version of her resulting story, entitled Morphogenesis, and manages to bring both Turing and his concepts to life, intertwining the two into a biographical tale of love, loss and lightbulbs. From the delightful ("his destiny is in his cells") to the heartbreaking ("the law will not allow him to be the man his own cells tell him he is"), Rogers’ story and her exquisite reading of it seems to bring the man himself shimmering into the room, apple in one hand, fir cone in the other.

After the story, Dr Martyn Amos, head of Novel Computation at Manchester Metropolitan University, takes to the stage to further elaborate on Turing and his theories. Amos places a lot of emphasis on Turing as a "great connector"; a scientist and mathematician who was unafraid to cross and mix disciplines. Amos correctly notes that science needs more interdisciplinarians to collaborate and contribute to each other’s fields in an effort to better enhance their own. Turing was a great proponent of this, fuelled by his simple fascination in all areas of natural life.

A Q&A session follows and questions from the floor range from the one which forces Dr Amos to assure us that he is NOT A ROBOT and another from a scientist at the back which contains so many unknown words my brain melts and I am unable to write it down. Fortunately for me, most of the rest of the audience seems equally bamboozled! If, indeed, Turing’s spirit has entered the room it would perhaps have been enough to encourage one of his elusive smiles.

As one observer notes, by bringing together scientists and writers in this fashion, a natural metaphor for morphogenesis arises; the scientist plants the original seed and the writer encourages it to grow into a work of fiction. The Comma experiment is a success; a great homage to a true Manchester hero.

David Hartley writes short stories and even shorter film reviews. He can be found at Do A Barrel Roll and his other blog, Screen150, recently won Blog Of The Year at the 2011 Manchester Blog Awards. Find him on Twitter: @lonlonranch and @screen150.

A difficult subject

2011-10-25T12:28:00.002+01:00

"The Mind Has Fuses": BS Johnson, Saturday 22nd October, 6pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Nick Garrard.

The Burgess Foundation is bulging with a capacity crowd for this evening of talks, readings and films in celebration of the late novelist BS Johnson. They have to fish out spare seats from the wings and there are people lined against the back wall, huddled around coats and shopping bags. It would be hard to imagine something like this happening in Johnson’s lifetime: though Burgess himself was a rare supporter of his work, Johnson never quite achieved mainstream acceptance and, frustrated with his perceived lack of success, took his own life at 40. He quickly fell out of print but, since the publication of Jonathan Coe’s loving biography Like A Fiery Elephant in 2004, he has undergone something of a critical revival.

Johnson’s work is hard to define. He offers his readers a wonderful grab-bag: funny, sincere, experimental and heartbreaking all at once. He was a great acolyte of Joyce and Sterne, and seemed to be constantly at war with the form. As David Quantick will later remark, one of the most interesting things about him is that he was a novelist who apparently hated novels - "oh, fuck all this lying" was a favourite catchphrase. So, while the turnout tonight would seem to indicate that he has now been semi-canonised by the literati, a number of walkouts towards the end suggests that his work can still cut too close to the core. Not very English, all this sincerity.
What we get this evening is a wonderful jumble, curated by people who clearly love their subject matter. The actor James Quinn reads excerpts from Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo. Journalist and critic David Quantick is on hand to present a scattering of his film work, as well as an endearingly fudged talk which positively buzzes with nerdish enthusiasm. The second half is dedicated to a screening of The Future's Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us, Beatrice Gibson’s inventive filmic reworking of House, Mother, Normal, a key Johnson text.

This, for me, was the highlight. Like the book, it presents an overlapping series of dialogues drawn from the residents of an old people’s home. They bicker and talk over each other, sometimes speaking nonsense, sometimes with the clarity of old age. The whole piece is presented as a text and there are chapter breaks and interspersed scenes in which the actors address the camera and read out their character descriptions. The fourth wall lies in tatters, even before I distractingly notice that one of cast used to be in Desmonds. I try to convince myself it’s the sort of thing Johnson would have approved of. Probably I’ve just watched far too much television.

It makes for a wonderfully disorientating close and when the lights come up and we’re ushered out into the cold, I still can’t quite make sense of it all. There’s a marvellous synchronicity when, shortly after one of the first walkouts takes place, an actor turns to the camera and says "you don’t know what you’re missing". How very apt, I think.

Nick Garrard lives and works in Manchester. You can follow him on Twitter @havershambler.

Words, walking and watering holes

2011-10-25T12:05:00.003+01:00

Boho Literary Pub Walk, Saturday 22nd October, 5-7.30pm, starting at the Midland Hotel

Words and photograph by Hayley Flynn.

This evening's walking tour takes in three local pubs each with their own literary ties and has proven to be a big attraction for Manchester Literature Festival, with a group of around 60 people gathering at the entrance to the Midland Hotel. We’re certainly a thirsty bunch. The tour is split into two groups to make it a more personable experience and I set off with Ed Glinert's group in the direction of The Peveril Of The Peak. Stopping off every now and then, we remember the massacre at St Peter's Fields and how 80,000 people demonstrated for the right to vote. The Peterloo Massacre is covered in several books including The Manchester Man by Mrs GL Banks but most radically, perhaps, by Shelley's poem The Mask Of Anarchy. Shelley lays heavy blame with the Conservative party and talks of murder and fraud - as such the poem was considered too libellous for publication at the time. Comparing Eldon to fraud embodied, Shelley makes a rather beautiful reference to the cotton mills of Manchester in the following verse: "Next came Fraud, and he had on, / Like Eldon, an ermined gown; / His big tears, for he wept well, / Turned to mill-stones as they fell".

Taking in the Bridgewater Hall, a site which Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson considers soulless, we approach the shimmering green delight that is the Peveril Of The Peak. Sitting like a little emerald island on Great Bridgewater Street, the pub is named after the Walter Scott novel and is also the name of the fastest stagecoach from Manchester to London. After we're all sated with beer and ready for the next venue, we stroll along the canal towpath learning as we walk about the political writer William Cobbett who carried the bones of Thomas Payne, a radical writer, with him when he visited Manchester. We stop off besides Manchester's longest running ballroom, The Ritz, and listen to the John Cooper Clarke poem Salomey Maloney: "I was walking down Oxford Road / Dressed in what they call the mode / I could hear them spinning all their smash hits / At the mecca of the modern dance, The Ritz".

By Bridgewater House, Ed recommends the best books that really make you understand Manchester through the ages, citing Love On The Dole by Walter Greenwood as an essential local read which sparks some discussions among the crowd about local authors. Weaving our way along the canal we reach our midway point, The Bank. Upstairs is the Portico Library and previous visitors and members have include Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas De Quincy, Elizabeth Gaskell and Val McDermid.

In the Evening Standard, 1936, George Orwell wrote an article describing the perfect pub. The pub should be free of music or any extraneous activities, he called this pub The Moon Under Water and it's this pub that the Wetherspoon chain is based upon. But we bypass Wetherspoons in favour of some local character and end our tour taking in the grand John Rylands library, home of the oldest piece of the New Testament, and have our final drink at the Sir Ralph Abercromby. This is the only building in the area to have survived the Peterloo Massacre and so nicely wraps up the tour back where we started.

Hayley Flynn won Best City And Neighbourhood Blog in the Manchester Blog Awards 2011 for her site, which features the regular Skyliner series, which looks at "the secrets above your eyeline".

Animal magic

2011-10-25T11:42:00.005+01:00

Family Storytelling - Toon Tellegen, Saturday 22nd October, 12 noon, Children’s Department, Waterstone's Deansgate

Words by Lisa Hart-Collins.

Toon Tellegen is a Dutch writer who has created a beautiful world populated by anthropomorphised animals that also deals with aspects of philosophy. He started his reading by briefly explaining how he follows a rather strict set of rules for his world. Firstly, all of his animals are the same size, which is important to understand when elephants are asking squirrels to dance. Secondly, in this world there is no hierarchy. Thirdly, there is only one of each thing to avoid confusion. The animals all like each other and want to share and there are no wars.

The children and adults sat around him in a sunlit corner of the children’s department as he began to tell his tales. At first some of the children were rather busy playing with other books, but as each story went on they became more and more involved. Almost as involved as the parents!

He was reading from his recently translated work The Squirrel’s Birthday And Other Parties and started with a story about a snail who built an extension onto his home, so that he could have a party. This was certainly an odd one, but definitely an endearing tale. He also read A Speck Of Dust, The Rhinoceros, Wish List and The Whale And The Seagull, but my personal favourite was A Cake For Someone Who Doesn’t Fancy Cake, because – just like the Squirrel and the Ant in the tale – I always fancy cake.

Although the event started with only a handful of people, it quickly filled up when people had managed to get past the press and crowds in St Ann’s Square, where Betty Driver’s funeral was being held.

The time passed ridiculously quickly and Toon then honoured me with a chat. I asked him very little, as he was a wonderfully warm and chatty man who was willing to offer lots of information. He told me that this was only his second reading in the UK, the first one being a year ago in the small village of Briar Marston, a place where he spent a summer as a 14 year old and to which he returned and read to their primary school.

We also discussed how sometimes clever words created in our own language create an impossible situation for the poor translators, who have to try and find an alternative for an animal which is part beetle, ant and mole (molkevmier? Sorry If I have messed this one up, Toon!). I also exposed my true heart and told him that I too have written a children’s book, but that I – like him – also write for adults. I enquired whether such behaviour was more acceptable in the Netherlands as I understand that it is certainly less accepted here, and apparently it is equally misunderstood.

I finished by asking him for his thoughts on that now rather infamous Martin Amis quote regarding the circumstances under which he would write a children’s book. Toon was, as I expected he would be, wonderfully gracious about this statement, saying that although many in his circle back in the Netherlands were up in arms about it, that it really was a statement made to create controversy rather than reflect an understanding of the processes of writing for children.

Toon was a pleasure to meet and you should all go out and buy his wonderful books, even if you don’t have children.

Lisa Hart-Collins is a writer, traveller, teacher and artist. Not always in that order. Born in Manchester, her love/hate relationship with the city tends to send her running from and returning to it at irregular intervals. She is presently taking a sabbatical to attempt to get her children’s book published.

Cultural carry-out

2011-10-25T11:33:00.000+01:00

Poetry Takeaway, Saturday 22nd October, 11.30am-4.30pm, Whitworth Art Gallery

Words by Isobel Buckingham. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

When I think of a poet, the image that springs to mind is a bearded, middle-aged Parisian, sitting in a café in Saint Germain, brooding over decadent verse, fuelled by the substances as familiar to his fingers as his pen; absinthe and tobacco. I am bewildered, therefore, upon arriving at the Poetry Takeaway event (the first time I have ever come into contact with these elusive creatures), to find the poets upbeat, down-to-earth and – dare I say it – normal. The "emporium", as it is referred to, looks delightfully awkward against the sumptuous backdrop of the Whitworth Art Gallery; its rickety structure almost visibly strained by an incredible amount of words bouncing to and from the assiduous minds of renowned poets Tim Clare, Dominic Berry and Rob Auton.

An idea brewed by Tim Clare and producer Tom Searle, the Poetry Takeaway Emporium travels the country’s finest festivals, creating made-to-order poems in under 10 minutes ("under 15 minutes!" squeals a pressured Dominic Berry), wrapped in authentic takeaway boxes and performed to the peckish poetic consumer – free of charge. Steady waves of people drift over to "order" their poems. The requests vary greatly from person to person. One man is resolute in his wish for a poem about confusion; 10 minutes later, Tim Clare is reading back his well-cooked poem which dealt with the terrifying truth that neither communism, capitalism nor socialism can "fix" society, and which ends with the profound comment on the covetousness of human nature, "if I see two bicycles, I want the best one".

As the effervescent, Manchester-grown Dominic Berry’s first Poetry Takeaway customer (finally, a claim to fame), I am initially asked for a vague topic upon which he should base my poem. Although I am desperate for him to create something reminiscent of Coleridge’s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, the conversation takes a natural turn towards the horrors of the university application process. No, the idea of a poem about forms and grades doesn’t appeal to me much, either. But, 15 minutes later, Dominic steps out of the emporium and animatedly performs the poem he has written based on our conversation; an existential ballad about waiting for confirmation, with allusions to Coleridge and Yeats ("don’t step upon my dreams"). I am impressed to say the least.

This dynamic triad of poets has never before worked together at the Poetry Takeaway Emporium. It is, as Tim Clare so magically put it, an "unprecedented constellation" of poetic skill in an infinitive sky of accomplished writers. This remark particularly resonates with me, since the whole event seems so charmingly dependent on luck and chance; "remember Anneka Rice?", Dominic Berry suddenly asks - and she becomes the foundation for a poem titled Manhunt, requested by a presenter from Radio Manchester, who are broadcasting live from the event.

Poetry has always been viewed as something that feeds the mind and the soul of the reader. At the Poetry Takeaway, however, the poets are unanimous in declaring that, in fact, the "customers" feed their poems; Tim Clare recounts his becoming temporarily, and bizarrely, enamoured with lawn bowling, after being asked to write a poem on that very subject. "Suddenly their issues matter to you," he explains. "In fact, I’d say it was 50% about being a poet, and 50% about actually listening to other people." This is not an advocacy for literature and poetry; if the Poetry Takeaway chefs did not cook up poems that would satisfy the interests of the customer, then a nasty bout of poetry-poisoning could rear its monstrous head. Although I notice that most poems bring a warm smile to the customer’s face, Tim tells me gravely that about one person per shift will break down in tears. "Usually the poet!" quirks Dominic.

Gustave Flaubert is said to have spent up to a week sweating over each page of his novel Madame Bovary, indefatigable in his constant quest for "le mot juste". While I watched the poets frantically scribbling, their heads bent over the countertop, only their eyes visible above their raincoats, it occurred to me how astonishing it is to think that 21st-century poetry could be ordered, created and enjoyed, the literary equivalent of a guilt-free Big Mac; I believe it to be proof that we are living in what is indisputably an exciting time for English literature.

Isobel Buckingham is a Year 13 student at Altrincham Girls' Grammar School, hoping to study English and French at university next year.

Learning from others

2011-10-25T11:18:00.003+01:00

Poetry Business Workshop, Saturday 22nd October, 10.30am, Becker Room, City Library

Words by Jo Bell.

"If you’ve been up all night or you’re hungover, then you might get some particularly good work out of today," says Ann Sansom. Well, this is promising: I am fresh (or not) from a 12-hour train journey after a break in Skye, and not at my scintillating best. Perhaps I should strive to always feel as if I have lived on fish and chips for a week, and travelled in grubby trains for a day at a time. Actually, most of the time I do feel like that; so by Ann’s reckoning I’m ahead of the game.

Ann and husband Peter run The Poetry Business. They lead workshops across the UK and regular writing days in Sheffield; they produce the fine poetry journal The North and the Smith/Doorstop series of pamphlets; and, for 25 years now, they have fostered new poetry talent with quiet kindness and generosity. This workshop has sold out quickly: a dozen or so poets, most fairly experienced, gathered in the Becker Room of the City Library to share some creative chemistry.

The Sansoms favour a fluid, write-it-fast-and-leave-it-be style of writing, which might indeed work especially well in a fragile or altered state, and which certainly generates four or five nascent poems in this 2½ hour session. It’s a standard format - write and read back, write and read back - with poems by Paul Farley, Denise Levertov and others to spark off particular trains of thought. Peter and Ann are old hands at making their workshoppers feel comfortable, and everyone is willing to share their work.

The exercises are pitched rather low for a group which includes several experienced writers – "write about an inanimate object", or "write about yourself at a younger/older age" are long-familiar fare. But perhaps any exercise that jolts us out of a rut and into a new way of telling the truth is worth playing with, and certainly any new writing shared in a workshop deserves to be heard with respect. The poet’s job, after all, is to notice and to report back from the front line. Your front line will be different to mine; your inanimate object might be a button, mine a narrowboat. The point of a workshop is not just to get us writing but to get us writing together – to encourage those who aren’t sure where to start, to motivate those who fear they have stopped, and to catalyse that creative chemistry that can only happen when writers get out of their garrets and sit around a table with a shared purpose.

Stepping out into Deansgate, several of us go on to the Poetry Takeaway at the Whitworth Gallery, where Manchester performance poet Dominic Berry is among today’s "chefs". It’s my birthday tomorrow, so I order a poem on that subject and Dominic obliges, delivering my freshly prepared order on the gallery steps. It’s a bright, breezy day on Oxford Road and the afternoon lies ahead of us. I think I might go and write a poem…

Jo Bell is a poet, promoter and producer of live literature. She is the director of National Poetry Day and currently working on a new live show, Riverlands, with storyteller Jo Blake.

A bit of Northern honesty

2011-10-25T11:09:00.007+01:00

Poetry From The North: Geoff Hattersley, Allison McVety, Ann Sansom and Peter Sansom, Friday 21st October, 1pm, Becker Room, City Library

Words by Shaaheda Patel.

It’s day 12 of the Manchester Literature Festival, and on a sunny Friday lunchtime, I find myself squeezing into the brimming Becker Room; a charming Victorian room on the first floor of the City Library. Festival director Cathy Bolton points me towards a wooden chair that was resourcefully being used as a doorstop; allowing the final trickle of Northern blood to enter.

Luckily, I now find myself sat in the front row.

Immediately Cathy walks to the front of the crowded room and announces today’s celebration of The Poetry Business’ silver jubilee and 25 years of The North: a magazine capturing Northern poetry, articles, reviews and features.

Editor of The North Peter Sansom springs towards the mosaiced fireplace. While holding his reading glasses in his right hand, Peter begins to read from the latest publication; the first is Stay, a poem by Jeanette Hattersley. The poem takes us to Darlington through the poet’s gentle reminiscences. Peter tells us that this 25th anniversary edition of The North celebrates by reprinting some of the most popular poems in the magazine’s history.

We experience this first hand now through further readings of Simon Armitage’s Zoom and Suddenly by Diana Hendry.

Allison McVety now takes to the stand, dressed in coordinated chocolate brown and a striking red lipstick. She explains that Manchester is her home town; even though she now lives in the South. She recalls her days at Whalley Range High School with its brown uniform and the bus conductor who would get away with unbuttoning school girls’ blouses. She continues by playfully sharing her long-term love with a boy whose name she still does not know. She calls him Boy On The Bus and now reads a poem about him dressed in “air force blue”, “casual cool” and her lonely “17 stops of feeling blue”.

Her next poem paints a picture of post-industrial Manchester in Urmston Brickworks. Here we learn of her frequent escapes from her mother-in-law, who lives in Flixton.

She receives a rapturous applause, disturbing the silent room after each reading. “At home”, she tells us, “I would never get this, the dog will yawn and my husband will tell me he is going out.”

Her next poem was published in The North issue 41. Before she begins reading she asks if there are any psychologists in the room. We look around and shake our heads in unison, intrigued by her question.

She reads from the poem, The Two Times I Saw Your Penis; a matter-of-fact poem about her father. With her audience bewitched by her frank and honest words, she now shares her memories of school, and in particular the times when she would attend school having not read "the right books". Fittingly, this poem is set in a library. She softly summarises how, “everything happens in parenthesis”.

Now Peter Sansom introduces the Northern poet Geoff Hattersley (pictured). He reads from the blurb of his latest collection. “Geoff Hattersley is a welcome subversive and ’the real thing’,” we are told. Geoff, in his baggy shirt and salt and pepper hair, stands up, faces the fireplace and takes a drink of water. He turns around and we hear his uncut Yorkshire twang. He tells us how poems were always from the South and was pleased to find this magazine that allowed poems about things like vests.

His simplicity makes us smile.

He reads from the poem His Fingernails, and plainly tells us, “I never quite knew what this one meant”. He continues reading about a pub in Barnsley and an old couple in the corner who never left, even when the pub was given a facelift to attract the local twentysomethings.

The afternoon now moves from the quirky to the surreal, with Geoff's collection of poems on "hebium", inspired by a dream in which a Dutch lady asked him, “Where’s the hebium?” His quest for the meaning of hebium sparks off lines such as “you have a hebium infection” and “happy hebium honey”. The audience are now in stitches; the applause gets louder and takes longer to subside.

The afternoon has come to an end.

Seamlessly, the table of neatly arranged festival leaflets now becomes a shop, and we crowd around wanting to get our hands on the publications featured in this afternoon’s event.

Leaving the heaving room, my chair a doorstop once again, I begin to understand what Northern poetry actually is. It’s poetry that’s punchy, it’s distinct and it’s downright honest. But paradoxically, Northern poetry still embodies a universality that stems from its need to be ordinary and original.

Shaaheda Patel is a teacher of English Language and Literature at a sixth-form college in Blackburn. She blogged for the Festival in 2010 and has worked on literature development projects with Time To Read.

More than enough love

2011-10-25T10:56:00.004+01:00

Not Many Love Poems: A Tribute To Linda Chase, Thursday 20th October, 7.30pm. International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Laura Maley.

Judging by the number of people arriving to join this tribute to Linda Chase, founder of Poets & Players who died in April, I suspect the event could easily have run twice at capacity. Linda had been a keen supporter of tonight’s venue, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, from its early days and it seems a fitting place to launch her new anthology, for Manchester’s Carcanet, Not Many Love Poems.

The evening begins unforgettably with music. The Mariachoos serenade the audience with a medley including La Bamba, Twist And Shout, Let’s Twist Again, Pretty Woman. It’s brilliantly funny (and good!), complete with huge wobbly moustaches. They follow with a moving version of The Kooks’ Valerie which comes “from the heart”.

Linda’s friends, colleagues and family members read poems from Not Many Love Poems and 2001’s The Wedding Spy. Most introduce their selections with some little nugget of personal memory about Linda.

The evening is introduced by Carcanet editor Michael Schmidt (pictured) who speaks about Linda’s passion for poets to read aloud – an idea to which she eventually brought him round. He even describes Found And Lost, which he reads, as needing to be “in the air”.

Jeffrey Wainwright describes Linda’s work as having many different tones in her voice and the two poems he reads are great examples of Linda’s richness. In Old Jewish Men, she writes in such strong and sure loving tones of “heart keys” and “love looseners”, which contrasts with Lost Souls From Christie Hospital, which is rife with delicate and confused fragility.

I really enjoy John McAuliffe’s reading of two conversational poems; they’re full of brightness and sensitivity. Dare is a reluctant discussion about death which is breathtaking and devastatingly powerful. Asleep And Awake similarly ponders on death, but with a more accepting, final-moments, perspective. Both these poems share a wonderful sense of rhythm.

Poet and writer Grevel Lindop tells the audience he shared a sense of writing about subjects “you’re not supposed to write about” with Linda. He reads the poignant Ticks And Kisses, dealing with mastectomies and the effects they have on people (not just the women who undergo them) which is shot through with humour and a deceptively light tone right up until the stark, final line.

Linda’s daughter Cleo reads Taffeta, a poem about Linda’s mother, Cleo’s grandmother. It’s a great piece of atmospheric, Chanel-drenched nostalgia for a 1950s housewife so perfect, as Cleo tells us, she even had curtains to suit every season.

James McGrath reads poems Linda wrote for her friend Ella, celebrating Ella’s home and friendship. Linda herself extended her home and family to so many that these themes – and the dining table motif, as James points out - come up repeatedly in her work. Gift House is a celebration of home comforts and the rich fruits of friendship.

Paying tribute to the speed with which Linda set up Manchester Poetry School, fellow poet Mimi Khalvati is clearly impressed with Linda’s "just get on with it"attitude (or the Linda-ness of Linda, as Matthew Welton describes it later). She chooses to read Yesterday which finds languid beauty in the Mersey’s flow and familiar changes from summer to autumn with “the reddening leaves, the bright berries splattered against the Wedgwood sky”.

Fellow Carcanet poet Carola Luther (Mimi and Carola both launched new Carcanet poetry collections at this year’s Manchester Literature Festival) says she’s reading First Thought, about the act of writing and of thinking about what you write, because she can hear Linda’s voice in it. The poem has a characteristic freedom and openness in the imagery, ending with, “a true writer is one who never lied”.

The tenderness of Night Vision, selected by Matthew Welton, feels almost too intimate for readers to be allowed in; it’s nearly a peeping Tom of a poem. “I open the duvet and draw you in / as the feathers fill their cases”.

Linda’s celebration of female spirit and independence in One Woman Dancing holds massive appeal for me. It seems to capture Linda’s charisma and inspirational nature, ending as it does: “I don't have to dance if I don't want to dance, / but I do, so I do. One woman dancing. / Look, there's another. And another. / Each of us out there, eyes shut, rocking. Yes!”

What feels abundantly clear, to me, from this glimpse into Linda’s work and her life - and in anecdotes tonight from those who knew her so well - is the importance, for her, of connection; whether as a response to the invasion of cancer, sharing family meals and stories, or giving thanks for a friendship. Linda’s body of work and the new collection Not Many Love Poems is filled with a graceful sense of movement, beauty and a very personal warmth.

Laura Maley lives and works in Manchester and blogs about arts and culture at Cultural Shenanigans. You can follow her on Twitter @elle_c_emm

Survival stories

2011-10-23T17:18:00.001+01:00

Words on Asylum & Refuge, Saturday 22nd October 2011, 12.30pm, Cross Street Chapel

Words by Richard Jackson.

On the penultimate afternoon, as well as being one of the busiest days of this year’s Manchester Literature Festival, the doors to the Unitarian Chapel - on Cross Street - open to a crowd of festival-goers, all eagerly taking advantage of the book sale that coincides with today’s event. In support of Amnesty International, with 2011 being the 40th anniversary of the Manchester Amnesty group, all the proceeds from this event go to the work of the organisation.

The book sale is just one of the reasons why this afternoon’s gathering is unique amongst others held by the festival. Firstly, it is the surroundings: the circular seating arrangement, in which everyone is facing one another, creates an intimacy that is entirely appropriate for the theme of the afternoon. This, as well as the 30 minutes or so everyone spent buying books beforehand, allowing for conversations to spark – between the audience and today’s speakers alike – produces a comfortable and warm setting, one suitable for an event that stirs as much emotion as this.

After words from the representatives of Amnesty International, we are introduced to those appearing today: Mende Nazer and Caroline Clegg, Segun Lee-French, as well as Aslee and Zofia, representatives of the Manchester-based Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST).

Beginning with Mende Nazer, author of the harrowing memoir Slave and a notable human rights activist, we are introduced to her through Caroline Clegg. Caroline, director of Feelgood Theatre, adapted Mende’s book for the stage. The play premiered at the Lowry theatre, in Salford, late last year. There is clearly great affection between the two ladies, with Caroline expressing how moved she was moved by Mende’s story, “before I finished reading it - through tears, rage and often most of joy and laughter in celebration of Mende’s culture - I just knew I had to do something about what I had read”.

Mende sets the scene and starts with a description of her happy childhood. Growing up within the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, she notes “My childhood was absolutely wonderful. It was just free of responsibility, and it was an amazing childhood - like every child deserves. Everyone who lives in the Nuba Mountains are farmers, and they look after their own animals. Life is very simple and safe, and it’s just amazing.” This though, is a prelude to Mende’s difficult story. One day, in 1994, Mende’s village was attacked and raided, under the Scorched Earth policy by the Arab North Sudanese government. During the destruction of her village, she was caught and taken to Khartoum with a group of other captured children. In the capital, she was sold into slavery, spending the next years of her life in servitude to families in Sudan and London, during which, as Caroline describes: “Mende cooked, cleaned, no day off, no pay, she was beaten, abused, and completely dehumanised. Forced to speak Arabic, she wasn’t allowed to speak her own cultural language. If she was found singing or anything, she was beaten. This became her daily life, still not knowing what happened to her family, not knowing if they survived the raids, what had happened to her friends or anyone.”

Visit the Mende Nazer Foundation.

Such was the emotional weight of Mende’s testimony, and Caroline’s words, the latter half of the event continued with Segun Lee-French uttering: “It’s not often that such people can make you feel like crying, but that really did move me, so I feel a little bit inadequate to follow” - though he shouldn’t. Working for the Manchester group Speakeasy People, Segun is a writer, singer and poet that puts on events that concern human-rights causes. Though only a short performance, he uplifts the audience through interactive poetry readings, as well as singing songs about “championing the underdog” and “the need for equal opportunities for everyone”. Intelligent and well spoken, I would recommend catching a performance of his to all.

Ending the event, are Aslee and Zofia from WAST. WAST, formed in 2005, works for women to have a “safe, mutually understanding and supporting environment, in which to talk about their experiences and trauma in fleeing their home countries, and the issues they are facing under the immigration system in Britain”. Having over 100 members, we learn from Aslee how the women help each other, most still waiting to learn the outcome of their asylum petitions. Following this, a reading is given by Zofia – herself an asylum seeker, currently receiving help from WAST – from their publication Am I Safe Yet. The book contains a selection of experiences from WAST members, and is available to buy now. Please visit the WAST website: it contains important information about WAST, as well as how one can involve themselves and offer help. In particular, it offers information of how to contact Nick Clegg and Theresa May, in regards to ongoing petitions of asylum.

Richard Jackson is a PhD student interested in Central and Eastern European history, literature and culture. His blog, Lemberik, concerns the issues of minority populations in this region and he can be followed on Twitter via @lemberik.

The PEN is mightier than the sword

2011-10-23T17:04:00.000+01:00

Writing Freedom: The Story Of English PEN, Saturday 22nd October, 3.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Elinor Taylor. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation played host to a stimulating and original exploration of the history of English PEN as it celebrates its 90th birthday. The original format of the event entailed readings from two novelists, Edward Docx and Catherine O’Flynn, and two poets, Shamshad Khan and John McAuliffe. Between them, these authors read scripted scenes from the early days of English PEN, extracts from the letters and diaries of writers imprisoned around the world, and contributions to landmark debates hosted by PEN. The presence of these four distinguished writers, and their feeling for the words they read, brought to life vividly the history of this organisation, the profile of which is perhaps lower than it ought to be among ordinary readers.

English PEN (standing for Poets, Essayists and Novelists) was founded in 1921 by Amy Dawson Scott to promote literature as an aid to understanding among nations, and to campaign for the freedom to write and the freedom to read. This celebratory event began with a reading of its founding charter, including the memorable assertion that, “Literature knows no frontiers, and should remain a common currency between nations in spite of political or international upheavals”. Its members pledge to “champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in one world”. Over the course of the afternoon, the importance of defending these clear and inspiring principles was eloquently affirmed, while the difficulties of defending them through the ensuing 90 years, in a world in which such motifs of mutual understanding have become unfashionable, were not glossed over.

It is through readings of the words of imprisoned writers that the reality of persecution and oppression is brought home – the diary of a Turkish socialist journalist, the letters of a South Korean writer, and the harrowing account of a persecuted Iranian writer. These performances were gripping, leaving no doubt of the indispensability of PEN’s work. The event then gave the audience a taste of some of the debates on free speech hosted by PEN, most notably the strikingly divided contributions to the debate that followed the fatwah on Salman Rushdie. Some made for uncomfortable listening, but in so doing they testified to PEN’s necessary role as an organisation within which delicate issues of freedom can be seriously debated. The idealism of its founding charter may seem problematic now, and the principle of freedom of speech less than transparent, but this only makes it more vital that the conversation continues. Increasingly, PEN has been involved in debates about how to respond to threatening and inciting speech, and the balance between protection and censorship; the evolution of its role was the subject of a lively question and answer session.

This was a well-structured event that left the audience persuaded that the struggle for the freedom to read and write is vital, and is far from won. The IABF, named for a writer who was himself no stranger to the controversies of censorship, was a fitting venue, and proves itself once more to be key part of Manchester’s cultural landscape.

Elinor Taylor researches 1930s literary Communism at Salford University, where she also teaches. She writes fiction and the odd poem.

Science and nature

2011-10-23T16:55:00.001+01:00

The Devil's Garden: Edward Docx and Johan Oldekop, Saturday 22nd October, 1pm, The Manchester Museum

Words by Nija Dalal. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

In a quiet room on the topmost floor of the Manchester Museum, Johan Oldekop, a biologist, begins a discussion of his research in the Amazon. He stands in front of about 30 people, and illuminates the complexities of environmentalism and conservation when placed against indigenous peoples' concerns. “The environment,” he says, “is like a plastic cup. You can squeeze a plastic cup, and it will change its shape, but it can re-form and it will still hold water. But if you squeeze it too hard, it’ll break, and it won’t be able to hold water any more, and importantly, it won’t be a cup.” Why squeeze the cup? Development.

He put it most starkly by telling us about how one village is currently six hours away from the nearest hospital by boat... but if those villagers had a road, they would only be one hour away. They want a road, but conservationists want to maintain the rainforest, and in the heart of the Amazon, Oldekop argues, is where issues of science, progress, humanity and the environment come together. Where do human rights, such as access to medical care, trump environmental concerns, and who should be the beneficiaries?

Oldekop's research focused on the role of rural communities in conservation initiatives and environmental impacts, so his work fits neatly in with today's other speaker, Edward Docx.

The Devil's Garden, by Docx, is about a scientist named Dr Forle, who is based on a river station deep in the South American jungle. Docx begins by telling us that he’s happy to be in Manchester promoting his new novel, because Manchester is his home town.

First, Docx discusses his inspirations that led him to write this book, including Coetzee and Conrad. He describes casting his characters in such a way to maintain conflict. “Conflict is drama,” he says. For example, if there’s a scientist, then there should be a religious person to conflict with the scientist. He tries to imagine his characters as a whole cast, in the round, so that there’s always drama. In The Devil’s Garden, he says, there’s drama because it’s about the conflict between corporations, environmentalists, scientists, missionaries and indigenous people.

But the real issue that his novel is about (and, he says, that every novel is really about) is how we should try to live.

Edward Docx then reads out some short sections of his novel before the floor is opened to the audience for a Q&A. The discussion ranges from eco-tourism to ethics, but most interestingly, one audience member challenges both Oldekop and Docx’s work. By explaining how all the complications and complexity of decisions around environmentalism are so interrelated, they’re essentially saying there’s nothing we can do that would be both fair to everyone and still save the earth. It’s despairing, and shouldn’t we just stop even trying to save this planet? Shouldn’t we just work on finding a new one to colonise, if this is all so complicated that, in the end, we simply can’t figure out what the best route might be?

In response, Oldekop and Docx both recognise the despair in their works, but Docx tempers this sentiment by saying that humans have always been inventive and creative. Art, he thinks, is humanity’s redemption. While his book is dark, he feels it is full of light. If people will re-read the book (which, he says, “is the only way of really reading”!), he thinks they’ll find it suggests there is a future.

And Oldekop agrees, saying that nihilism is dangerous, because if we really begin to believe there’s nothing we can do, then it will stop us doing anything to protect our planet or take care of people.

Nija Dalal is a writer, radio producer, and a second-generation Indian-American. She's radio obsessive, cooks and crafts and sews, and keeps a blog about it when she remembers. Currently in Manchester, she's lived in Sydney and Atlanta, and she's looking for a job in radio.

All Wells and good

2011-10-23T16:45:00.001+01:00

David Lodge: A Man Of Parts, Friday 21st October, 7.30pm, Whitworth Art Gallery

Words by Benjamin Judge.

I had always thought that HG Wells was just this bloke who wrote some books and once said something a tad unfortunate about eugenics. But it appears there was more to him than just War Of The Worlds and The Time Machine (the film version of which featured Samantha Mumba. Remember her? I’ve just Wikipedia-ed her and she had more hits than you think. And she once dated Sisqo. Who did Thong Song. Remember? No? What? I’m getting distracted? HG Wells? Oh, yes. Right. HG Wells. Sorry.).

It turns out that apart from being a writer and thinker, ol’ HG was something of a card as well (or "player", to use the modern vernacular). In fact, so long was the list of his love affairs and casual conquests that David Lodge gave as examples of Wells’ behaviour that I was surprised he had the energy to even pick up a pen, let alone write over a hundred books.

Wells was, I suppose, the Sisqo of his day. Both masters of the written word (compare Wells’ “Yet so vain is man and so blinded by his vanity...” to Sisqo’s “I like it when the beat goes da na da na”), both most happy when “dat dress so scandalous”. It is in no way hyperbole to suggest that if your family was based in South London between 1866 and 1946, chances are you are related to HG Wells. That man really did love “that thong th-thong thong thong”.

David Lodge, in his new biographical novel, A Man Of Parts, uses Wells’ love life as a framing mechanism to tell his story. He explained how while writing a biographical novel has the advantages for the author of relieving him of the duty of making up a story, and giving him the readers' belief (which, he points out, is particularly useful with someone like Wells, whose life was so unusual), it presents him with one major problem: that of finding a “novel-shaped story” within somebody’s life. Wells’ women provide this novel-shaped story because there are so many repeating motifs (two sexless marriages, two affairs with brilliant undergraduates, two lovers with young suitors that they would eventually marry, many affairs with women novelists and essayists), which allowed Lodge to create patterns within the text, and create fact in the guise of fiction.

Lodge’s talk was, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background in education, effectively a lecture on the genre of biographical fiction interspersed with readings from his new novel. Put simply, it was rather brilliant; a highlight of what has been a vintage year for the Manchester Literature Festival. It is not often one gets such an insightful look into how a writer approaches his work, or what a respected critic thinks a genre, such as the biographical novel, should and should not strive for.

Lodge is an engaging and generous host, giving long and thoughtful answers to questions posed by the crowd. Asked how he felt about the possibility that in the future his own life might become the material for a novel, he laughed, and admitted that he would hate it, and that Wells would probably hate his own book. “A contradictory answer,” he smiles, “but then, novelists are contradictory.”

Benjamin Judge's blog, Who The Fudge Is Benjamin Judge?, was joint winner in the Manchester Blog Awards 2011 in the Best Writing On A Blog category, and he is also one of the five winners of The Real Story competition.

Super troopers

2011-10-22T15:10:00.001+01:00

Superheroes Of Slam Final, Thursday 20th October, 8pm, Yard Theatre

Words by Kevin Danson. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

This year’s Superheroes Of Slam Final, hosted by Manchester Literature Festival and Commonword, opens its doors to an eager crowd waiting to cram the Yard Theatre’s stalls to bask in two hours of the best local poetry from around the North. Competing to win a £250 cash prize and the Dike Omeje Slam Champion Trophy are the finalists from Manchester, Gift Nyoni; Liverpool, Rael James; Leeds, Zodwa Nyoni; Wigan, Louise Fazackerley; Oldham, Mark Mace Smith; Newcastle, Aidan Clarke, and Crewe, Emma Purshouse.

Bouncing onto the stage is the excitingly spontaneous Dominic Berry, writer/poetic performance artist and winner of the previous Slam Final. Appearing to never suffer from a pout or frown, Dominic introduces us to the judges of this stirring competition: Baba Israel, Artistic Director at Contact Theatre, writer/poet and Commonword’s very own Yvonne McCalla, and one of Arts Council England’s Alison Boyle. In addition to these "celebrity" judges, two members of the audience are chosen to award points for the public. Points are awarded for both performance and content. Poets have three minutes to Slam! their poems before they are interrupted by a gruelling noise made by Segun Lee-French. A founding member of Manchester’s Speakeasy People poetry and music collective, Mr Lee-French tests the judges with a theatrical performance of one of his own works which describes a typical Mancunian Friday night down Deansgate.

The first round is astounding. If I had known I would be in the vicinity of such talent I may have brought an autograph book. There is a huge variety of material; accidental muses, cigarette nubs, slavery, wars, modern love, pigeon-loving smack heads. I felt like I had boarded the Pepsi Max of poetry. Aidan throws us a quickie on young lovers before he begins his competing poem: "Oh how romantic / now they’re alone / she’s checking Facebook / he’s on his phone".

Despite each contestant’s pieces being worthy of the rapturous applause received, there are three which I should mention; Emma Purshouse’s poem on cigarette nubs, Zodwa Nyoni’s intense piece on global wars (first whopping 10 for content) and Rael James’ skill with rhyme and meter - together with his expressive words, this gets him awarded the second sparkling 10 for content.

Welcoming back the increased gathering, Dominic covers us with one of his own poems called Time Travels, recently written and with an admirable annunciation to Manchester Literature Festival 2011 (hooray!). While the poets reel off their craftworks in the second round, the air feels somewhat tenser. Legs twitch, contenders rub their hands as they look on at their opponents. Even I can feel my heartbeat picking up its pace. Themes seem to have subdued in this heat; lost love, riots, a passionate voice about passionate voices, yet up we go again with Emma's entertaining Mexican fruit machine song. Mark takes control of the stage with a heartfelt performance and Rael stitches my memory with the words "I want to do cartwheels to show you how my heart feels". What a rolling sea of verbal waves. In accordance with Dominic, I have to say Rael really is a Ninja of rhythm and rhyme.

The air is heavier than ever. We crane our necks to see how far the judges are with their tallying to reveal the final two who will go head-to-head in the ultimate word-off. It's Rael James and Mark Mace Smith.

So Low, So High is Mark’s final poem of the competition. And what a poem. Not only does it possess beautiful imagery of nature in conjunction with oneself, he provides it with incredible delivery, both vocal and physical, captivating the audience with a blending assonance and onomatopoeia. His final syllable collides with the sudden "out of time" noise. Phew.

Up next is Rael "Ninja" James. We sit and we listen to Rael’s meaningful words of a growing relationship, one that blossomed and grew, drawing tears, attracting envy. Everyone is paying attention to these sincere words uttered in his usual melodic, urban tone. He tells us he wants to share the object of his poem and so we sit, transfixed, waiting for him to produce… a pair of bloomin' trainers! This guy knows his art like a painter knows his paints.

Although very tight between the two finalists, Mark Mace Smith is declared winner of this year’s Superheroes Of Slam Final. In his modest demeanour he finishes his final performance with a homemade turntable-scratching political, satirical verse.

I speak to Mark briefly after his win. He explains he first began writing poetry to woo a girl in his teens. He sent her letters and poetry until he finally won her over. Seeing he had a gift, or something that would help him win further females, he became further inspired by some of the greatest lyrics surrounding him at the time. He loves to perform and after tonight we can see why.

Congratulations to Mark Mace Smith, Rael James and the other six grand finalists.

Kevin Danson is an English Literature student at MMU. Read his blog Pebbleddash and follow him on Twitter @pebbleddash.

Two is the magic number

2011-10-22T14:30:00.002+01:00

Mimi Khalvati & Carola Luther: Two Carcanet Poets, Thursday 20th October, 6pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Desmond Bullen.

We’re hardly a stone’s throw from the frustrated velocities of Oxford Road, but we could be a country mile. The International Anthony Burgess Foundation stands slightly to one side of the hectic artery, yet has a proudly beating heart just the same.

It’s an ideal spot in which to pay attention, and the two poets reading from their latest collections tonight reward such attention. They make audible the words they have committed to paper, give voice to their voices.

Of the two, Carola Luther grants the listener more space for inexact comparison. She reads with a growing confidence from Arguing With Malarchy, and, like a medium you might believe in, raises shades that resemble Beckett, Joyce or Eliot. The words resonate with exactitude, but they limn the inexact. Even a piece with the prosaic title, Travelling With Chickens seems shot through with the eerie precariousness of time and place.

Mimi Khalvati, in contrast, reading from Child: New And Selected Poems is less uncanny. Whereas Carola’s poetry slips the tethers of the material world, Mimi’s captures it in a Polaroid precision. In her pieces, the terrors of, for example, her lonely two-year-old self, have the same solidity as the elephant gewgaws of motherhood. Her works seem the more clearly autobiographical, drawing upon both her Iranian and British heritage with confidence, rather than confusion. This rings out in her reading, all warm tones and easy smiles.

Both are warmly applauded, and each speaks affectionately of the other. To favour either, when both are so accomplished seems somehow gauche, yet paradoxically, I feel that Carola’s allusiveness will continue to haunt me the longer once I have consigned myself again to Oxford Road’s all too concrete realities.

Desmond Bullen is working diligently towards his next rejection letter from the BBC.

The bees have it

2011-10-21T17:40:00.000+01:00

Poems Of The City: Guided Walk With Anne Beswick, Thursday 20th October, 1-2.30pm, Town Hall

Words by Elsie Anderton. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

I have a confession: I don't like poetry or walking. Both of these things are a continual disappointment to me, I blame my fondness for heels and impatience at flowery verse. In an effort at self-improvement, I volunteered to review Anne Beswick's Poems Of The City tour. This is not as mad as it seems, as I have a weakness for history and am unashamedly in love with my adopted city of Manchester (not easy to admit when you come from Yorkshire).

So there we stand, at that most Manchester of meeting points (the Town Hall clock) on a typically drizzly day. While I worry about the frizz of my hair and the stupid height of my heels, we wait for Anne, our Green Badge tour guide for the afternoon. Anne promises to open up the secrets of the city through history and poetry. She delivers in spades.

Anne takes us on a journey of Manchester’s architectural might (the Town Hall, the Free Trade Hall, the Midland Hotel, the Cathedral and the John Rylands Library) and hidden historical landmarks (the Wood Street Mission, the Shambles, the Lincoln Memorial and The Knock Shrine Shop). She shows us things that I scuttle past - head bent in commuting concentration - on a daily basis.

With good humour she stands in the chill air reading softly, with a delicious Manc twang, as the city flurries around her. We’re entranced. Anne’s poems perfectly evoke the scenes she is setting. Using the souring language (with not a flower in sight) of Allan Ahlberg, John Cooper Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Mike Harding, Rudyard Kipling and William Cooper, Anne brings to life the evolution of a city built on industry, reform and emancipation. From the horrors of the Peterloo Massacre, when ordinary men, women and children of Manchester were killed by dragoons as they protested for the vote, using Shelley’s Mask Of Anarchy. To the bees on the city’s crest and street furniture to represent Manchester as a hive of industry, using Kipling’s The Bee Boys.

And as if the poetry of others is not quite enough, Anne uses her own glorious verse of historical facts to weave together a picture of times past. Take the Abraham Lincoln Memorial, which makes sense when set against the backdrop of the American Civil War's stranglehold on the cotton trade. Lincoln’s blockading of all southern state trade to force them to relent on slavery led to the Lancashire Cotton Famine. After a meeting at the Free Trade Hall, the people with the power wrote to Lincoln to complain that his blockade was causing poverty, but that despite this they would back his endeavour to eradicate slavery as all men should be free.

Then there’s the Midland Hotel, owned by the Midland Railway Company who opened the first passenger rail station in the world in Manchester. They ignored the nay-sayers who said passenger travel would never catch on and that the 30mph speeds would cause your internal organs to get muddled. That’s Manchester for you: always at the forefront of fairness and progress.

I learned more about Manchester in an hour and a half with Anne, than I have in the 12 years that I have lived here. And I liked what I heard. I am enchanted by this city that put freedom above wealth and is firmly built on revolutionary foundations. I am proud to be a worker in this city of bees.

I bet you didn’t know that there’s a church crypt under the cenotaph on St Peter’s Square or that the British vegetarian movement was started in Manchester by Reverend Cowherd, did you? This stuff matters. Stop looking at the floor; book a tour.

Elsie Anderton is a gin-nurtered time waster, chickenwidow and author of the almost award-winning blog, The Babylon Lane Tales.

Female perspectives

2011-10-21T17:20:00.004+01:00

Sisterwives: Rachel Connor & Womanswrite, Wednesday 19th October, 6.30pm, Event Room, Waterstone's Deansgate

Words by Sarah Holland.

“It feels like the Oscars!” laughs Rachel Connor, holding up her water bottle. A beaming smile stretches across her face as she gives her grateful thanks to all those involved in the publication of her debut novel, Sisterwives, launching tonight. On this nippy Manchester evening the event room in Waterstone's, Deansgate, is aglow with positivity.

Tonight is a celebration of women’s writing. It commences with readings from three women who are part of Womanswrite, a writing group that has been run by the literature development agency Commonword for over 20 years. Its aim is to seek out new talents and develop the potential of new voices. Rachel Connor was one of their finalists.

The first little taste of new talent is a short story read by Melanie Amri. It is a candidly told account of child neglect and domestic abuse, written from the perspective of a young boy abandoned and left to care for his baby sister. Amri uses simplistic dialogue between the boy and his playmate, Dawn, to show the disparity between the poor and the privileged. Subtle observations describe the gulf between the two and the insignificance the boy feels by comparison; "our cat's got something in its fur, but hers hasn’t." Amri speaks slowly, alternating between enraged shouts and sorrowful whispers, and with a fitting childlike tone of naivety. She provides, and then must swiftly slide away to read at the Manchester Blog Awards at the Deaf Institute.

Nabila Jameel is next to the stand with her story Black Thread. It is told from the perspective of a young Asian girl who is on an intimate drive with her Muslim lover, through the winding country lanes of the Cheshire countryside. She absorbs the differences between the East and the West, struck by the civility of the Cheshire shops and the absence of shopkeeper harassment and scattered mango fruits abandoned in shop doorways.

Last to emerge is Hua Zi and her compelling piece, written in the form of a letter, from a woman to her 18-year-old child. The writer had been a student filled with promise and potential when she was drugged, taken into captivity in a remote Chinese village, and forced to marry a man she despised. It is a harsh reality still happening today which Zi wanted to explore through fiction. She reads unhurriedly, with calm and collected poise that makes it all the more gripping. The girl writes how she "longed to embrace the cold hard face of death". When she gave birth to her child, she felt "physical relief that his seed was out of me, you looked so much like your father you repulsed me". She considers suicide, but remembers the strength of parental love, and how her father told her it was "better to light a candle than face the darkness".

After enthusiastic applause for Womanswrite, Rachel Connor is introduced and is charmingly modest. “I can’t quite believe it. I’ve never launched a book before!", she gushes, and mentions that she used the “fantastic medium” of Twitter for tips on how to do a book launch. Someone advised her not to get drunk and another told her not to read from her book. The latter she carefully chose to ignore. The novel, about religious polygamy, has been brewing away for a while. Inspiration first struck when she listened to a radio programme about a wife who escaped a fundamentalist religious compound in Utah. Listening to the experiences fascinated her, particularly how the sister wives would share a bedroom and take turns with their husband.

Sisterwives centres on Tobias and his two wives, who share a home in a religious community in the country, separated from the “seedy” city of Lot. Rebecca is the dutiful first wife, and Amarantha is the young beauty who he truly desires. There is no specific location or time frame, the author prefers to think of it as "fable like" and "otherwordly".

There is an engaging and animated Q&A after her reading. Many are interested in how she managed to persevere and continue to strive until completion. She recalls times when she did consider giving up, but is so glad she did not. “It is fantastic to see it come into fruition,” she says. An audience member asks if she wants a sister wife, her blunt response is a no. Another proposes brother husband, to which she laughs and comments: “I don’t think I could handle it.”

She offers some inspiring words to the predominately female room: “When writing, you must separate entirely from feelings of negativity." For her, a novel in the process is a “big, shapeless lump of clay" that can always be refined. The diverse talent and dynamic discussion this evening means the hour has flown by. There is a strong sense of achievement in the air as the newly declared novelist exclaims how surreal the experience is. She is just getting to grips with the notion of having readers. It almost seems a novelty to her, and she ponders what these unfamiliar readers make of her writing. But her role is done now, and “they can make of it what they will”. As another novel is already in the midst of creation, she will soon start getting used to it.

Sarah Holland recently graduated in English Literature from Sheffield University and now lives in Manchester. She writes about the arts and has a screen blog, Girl On Film.

Imagineers of the Future

2011-10-21T16:10:00.000+01:00

Julie Bertagna And The Midland Future Manchester Competition, Saturday 15th October, 11am, The Stanley Room, Midland Hotel

Words by Jennie Shorley.

Hmmn, the apocalyptic consequences of climate change, and children’s literature. I’m not quite sure how this is going to work.

Julie Bertagna has clearly made it work however. Her trilogy of books for young adults: Exodus, Zenith and Aurora tell the story of young people fighting to survive in a world that is drowning in the melt from polar ice caps. They are highly successful; a fact evidenced by the excited kids on the front row of this event. Today Julie will discuss her work, and launch the Midland Future Manchester Competition; a contest for young people to write about the Manchester of the future.

I’m up quite early for a Saturday, and this, combined with the deep-pile of the Midland Hotel’s carpets, brews and biscuits, has me feeling very comfortable. And quite sleepy. Coupled with this, I am a 31-year-old sci-fi hater, so I’m not sure that I’m going to engage with this.

But I do. I really do.

Julie romps through literary history’s vision of the future, with a rather wonderful evocation of Mary Shelley’s elopement with Percy and Byron (a “male Lady Gaga, no less”), neatly sidestepping the adult undertones. In her background to how Frankenstein came to be written, she evokes the summer of 1816 when the sun did not shine on ashcloud-shrouded Austria (not of course without its modern parallels), the claustrophobic atmosphere of these creative minds isolated in this wilderness, and the recent invention of electricity. Technological advances are never far from the main narrative throughout Julie’s presentation; in the past, iPhones would have been seen as “magic” (I still have a sneaking suspicion that they are).

From here, she gallops through Wells, Huxley, Orwell, The Matrix, Bladerunner and Doctor Who to arrive at her inspiration. A news clipping, read in a café in Scotland while stuck for ideas (all very JK Rowling) about the Kiribati islands, a real example of the burgeoning results of climate change. They are physically losing islands under rising tides, and “battling the sea as if it were an enemy”. The image of a homeless young man staring out to sea certainly is haunting. And I am fully engaged in the story.

Julie goes on to introduce her first book, Exodus, where she imagined the fate of the Kiribati islands projected out; her story is set “in a century of storm”, where great floods span the earth, and the residents of an Orkney island cling to their home as long as one of the relics of their history, a red phone box, remains unsubmerged. When one day they find it underwater, they have to leave their home and become refugees.

Cut forward to the floods of 2007, when an image of such a phone box, fully flooded, appeared into the news. Julie felt “as if the future had crashed into the present”. Since then, her much-loved hometown of Glasgow has been flooded, more floods over Europe and Asia, and then Hurricane Katrina.

Bleak. But Julie counters this view by engaging with human ingenuity to explain that “whenever humanity has been hit with a big problem – we’ve always found a way to survive”. It is this “discovery” that leads her to her story, of cities built in the sky to escape these floods. In the final book, Aurora, the floods have left Greenland exposed, and there is a whole new land to live on. There is indeed hope. These books sound brilliant. And the story, in Julie’s lilting Glaswegian accent, has the audience enthralled.

She then introduces the competition to the kids, the “imagineers” who she urges to “set your mind on fire”, and to pen a story about Manchester, at least 10 years in the future. She asks for ideas from the audience, and I am in thrall to these kids’ imaginations. The first envisages a world where the poverty line is tangible, rich and poor live respectively above and below ground, and do not know of each other’s existence. Another wants to write about boys and girls living on opposite sides of the world, as the government has segregated them by a huge wall. Two dissidents come together to proclaim freedom on top of the wall. This is fantastic stuff.

This has been an inspirational event, not least in the way that Julie has engaged the audience, and the kids, to discuss their ideas and visions. She has claimed that her favourite endings are those where we don’t know what is going to happen. Her storytelling, coupled with the ticking bombs of these imagineers’ minds, make me think that whatever happens, I want to read right to the end.

Jennie graduated with a Masters in Ancient World Studies from The University Of Manchester, and is currently in the research training year of a PhD. She lives in the Northern Quarter and likes writing words and making things.

Ten years in the making…

2011-10-21T12:15:00.000+01:00

Literary Reputations: Kathleen Jones on Katherine Mansfield, Wednesday 19th October, 1pm, Becker Room, City Library

Words by Charlotte Hubback.

London, 1907. Imagine a young girl from New Zealand, dreaming of being a writer, just about to leave her teenage years behind. Her parents have not thought to inform her of the facts of life. She falls in love with a young musician, gets pregnant, panics. She decides to marry her music teacher, whom she does not love; but on their wedding night she cannot bring herself to consummate the marriage. Her mother eventually takes her to a German convent, and leaves her to bring the baby to term and give birth alone. The girl catches flu; the baby is stillborn.

This is Edwardian times so this shameful secret must never be spoken of again. "It marked her for life… It was the most important thing about her, the most true thing, and she couldn’t tell others."

The girl was Katherine Mansfield, one of the most influential short story writers of the 20th century, and Kathleen Jones, her most recent biographer, is recounting this to us. The audience hears the depth of compassion in Jones’ voice; and then the outrage when she outlines the actions of Mansfield’s mother: "It was such a callous act. I can’t believe anyone could do that to their own child."

Jones is a popular literary biographer of women writers ranging from Christina Rossetti to Catherine Cookson. She also writes short stories and is a published poet. It took her 10 years to research and write this latest biography, but her evident enthusiasm for her subject obviously lived up to the task. We hear the excitement in her voice as she describes arriving at one source’s house, someone she expected to have a small amount of relevant material – but then she was shown seven large boxes and to read them she had to stay for a week! We do not learn of her host’s reaction to this…

There has been a clutch of Mansfield biographies published already so the case is made for the new one, and I am certainly convinced. A wealth of new source material, some of which showed the extent of her husband, John Middleton Murry’s editing, is now in the public domain. Since the 1980s two scholars have worked tremendously hard transcribing diaries and letters, and Jones speaks of her huge gratitude to them for this. She is keen to rehabilitate the reputation of Murry, who seems to have been painted as Public Enemy Number One by many fans. Without his moulding of the "Mansfield Myth", Jones says the author would not be so widely read or known today. (He did benefit financially from this; he was accused of "grinding her bones to make your bread" and DH Lawrence accused him of "publishing her wastepaper basket".)

My interest is most piqued by the anecdotes concerning Mansfield’s talented contemporaries. At one point, she was struggling to find time to write due to their financial difficulties, constant house moves, and the "burden of domesticity". She met Rupert Brooke in the street and he asked, "Do you still write?" – a devastating inquiry.

Mansfield and Murry got to know Frieda and DH Lawrence; Katherine described them "as the only real friends we had", and the audience listens attentively to the complicated sexual and intellectual dimensions of this foursome.

And then there was the great friendship with Virginia Woolf; two equally brilliant writers and perhaps equally troubled individuals. Mansfield died, aged 34, from second stage TB. On her death, Woolf said, "When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer."

Jones illustrates her talk with some moving black and white images, helping to bring Mansfield’s gripping story to life. Murry married three more times, each episode almost sounding like an EastEnders plotline.

There is more to add but limits of space mean I must stop! At the end, the bookstall quickly sells all their copies of Jones' Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, and this seems a fitting end to a fantastic event.

We are in the Becker Room, on the first floor of the City Library on Deansgate. The room is Victorian; dark carved panelling, beautifully designed windows, each with stained glass at the top, and a moulded ceiling. It belongs to an age when illegitimate children were the ultimate taboo, tuberculosis was a death sentence, and a passionate, impulsive and extremely talented woman was made to suffer for her "sins". We owe many thanks to Kathleen Jones for delineating this life with such skill and verve.

The final words must come from an audience member: "You bought her to life as a person for me." What more could we ask of a biographer?

Charlotte Hubback is a freelance editor and a qualified counsellor. She contributed to Rob Frost: Reflections On A Life Well Lived (published by Authentic Media).

Making the conversation Flow!

2011-10-21T11:36:00.001+01:00

Flow!, Friday 14th October, 9.30pm, Contact

Words and photograph by Jennie Shorley.

Broken Rose Performing Arts Company and the Contact theatre come together for this revolutionary open stage event, which sees dancers in close conversation with poets.

So the programme says. I don’t completely understand what this means, so have no idea what to expect from this Friday evening in the Contact theatre.

My friend has never been to Contact before, and proclaims, as I first felt, that it looks like a castle from the outside, its soaring turrets at odds with the 70s façade of The University Of Manchester. And as we enter, the space designated for tonight’s performance has a magical, Alice In Wonderland air with a chequerboard floor, and is jammed in between the bar and the audience from the big show tonight. There is no boundary between the audience and stage, except for the edge of this performance space. It is all quite exciting.

Broken Rose’s Artistic Director, Gemma Connell, introduces the evening as “a total experiment” in improvised dance and slam poetry. The Contact theatre itself is a performer, with the dancers “using it as their music”. There will be three sections, 1 – a random pairing of a poet and dancer, 2 – a group session of the same, and 3 – a terror-striking-into-heart audience participation section.

I feel almost as nervous as the first poet, Dominic, looks, as his name is pulled out of the hat (no hat available, boot instead), and he takes to the stage, accompanied by Sarah; his dance-by-chance partner. As the audience hubbub dies down, he commences with emphatic shouts of “this is terrifying!” and I’m sure that we are all rooting for him.

And so he starts. I can’t distinguish between slam poetry and MC-ing, but that really doesn’t seem to matter. As Sarah confidently begins spiralling and twisting to the music from the DJ in the corner, Dominic concentrates on her, and they draw confidence from each other. Rushed words slow into a beating, melodic rap, as Sarah spins, whirls and challenges him. Suddenly I get it. The magic that comes from knowing that this will not happen again, that this experiment is for the here and now, and only for us. And I feel utter admiration for these two brave people, who love doing this so much that they will stand up, a short distance from the audience, stage, costume, script and lights stripped away, and just speak and move as if their lives depend on it.

The DJ’s ambient music is an unspoken partner in this experiment – if anything, it directs both dancer's and poet’s movements, volumes and beats. It is almost as if they hold on to the sound, because that is the one thing that is not down to them right now. I love it.

Two more of the same pairings follow, Jamal and Gemma, Indigo and Katie, with equally surprising and exciting results. With all three, the music is a leader for dancer and poet, the lines between the latter even blurred as the poet leans an exploratory arm out into the dancefloor. There are no rules here.

The group round, to me - although the performers work together well - isn’t quite as beautiful. The security of numbers means that the performers somewhat lean on each other for support, which, although especially the poetry, certainly works in terms of flow, doesn’t paint quite as stark a picture.

The group dance gives way to audience participation, after the usual sickening several seconds of complete silence when a teacher asks a question, the youngest audience member, seven-ish Nyah, is volunteered up to dance by his mum. After more silence, Roxanne, clutching her iPhone, uncertainly walks up from the crowd, and is cheered on by the audience, applauding in the knowledge that she is braver than all of us.

Of course, this section is even more of an experiment, and completely unscripted; these performers are not even on the bill. But they’re great. As with the other poets, it takes a short while for Roxanne to find her flow, and Nyah is brilliant, it's not just body-popping spectacular stuff, but he too is really feeling what’s going on and responding to her. This is the ultimate blurring between audience member and performer.

I leave feeling elated, full of admiration for these brave people, and impressed with their skill. The next event could have a freestyling musician for true randomness, but for me, Flow! really, well, flowed!

Jennie Shorley graduated with a Masters in Ancient World Studies from The University Of Manchester, and is currently in the research training year of a PhD. She lives in the Northern Quarter and likes writing words and making things.

On the buses with Anthony Burgess

2011-10-21T11:05:00.000+01:00

Anthony Burgess Tour, Saturday 15th October, 11am-2pm, Manchester Cathedral-International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words and photograph by Daniel Carpenter

Saturday really was the perfect day for a tour around Manchester, kicking off outside the beautiful sunlit Cathedral where we were treated to an origin story, hundreds of years in the making.

Anthony Burgess was born John Wilson in 1917, but his ancestors arrived much earlier than that. He claims to be related to Bonnie Prince Charlie whose stop-off in Manchester is well documented. There are a fair number of things that Burgess lays claim to throughout his life, and if I’ve learnt one thing from the tour, it’s that Anthony Burgess lost his virginity at least three times, in three different scenarios, at three different ages.

I knew there was a reason I loved his writing.

Manchester is an ever-changing city, and there’s a sad side to constant rebuilding in that we lose a lot of the smaller places that once held meaning to us. There were a great many places on the bus tour - from the city centre north to Harpurhey and Miles Platting then south to Rusholme and Victoria Park - where we would be told, "this is where he grew up", "this is where he lived for a few months", only to be faced with wasteland. Indeed, as our brilliant tour guide, Ed Glinert* would often flourish traffic jams with bonus history from across the city, we learnt a great many things, hidden in the walls and streets.

Less a tour on the influence of Manchester on his writing, more a life story. With readings from his Burgess' autobiography, alongside biographers' views on the time, the tour was a balanced, effective and insightful look into one of the modern era's most prolific writers.

*Ed is running another tour tomorrow (Saturday), starting at 5pm outside the Midland Hotel. This Boho Literary Pub Walk will visit the watering holes once frequented by Manchester-based writers, including Anthony Burgess.

Daniel Carpenter is a writer and one of the organisers of the monthly spoken word event Bad Language. He blogs at Winter Hill.

The blog which blogs about the Manchester Blog Awards

2011-10-20T18:06:00.003+01:00

Manchester Blog Awards, Wednesday 19th October, 7pm, Deaf Institute

Words by Tom Mason.

The literati of the city gathered in Trof Deaf Institute yesterday to celebrate the annual Manchester Blog Awards. Now in its sixth year, the event, which is part of the Manchester Literature Festival, is one of the landmark evenings in the local blogging community; each year, hundreds of residents submit their favourite local blogs for inclusion in the awards and, from that list, a select few are shortlisted for a gong. Gong is a fun word to say, isn’t it?

Anyway, last night, those lucky shortlisted few discovered which of them would walk away with one of six awards: Best City And Neighbourhood Blog, Best Personal Blog, Best Arts And Culture Blog, Best New Blog, Best Writing On A Blog and, the grand prix prize, Blog Of The Year. Links to the shortlisted blogs in each category and the eventual winners can be found on the MBA website.

The event, hosted by the organiser of the entire affair – the fabulous Kate Feld - started with four readings from The Real Story series, an autobiographical writing competition held in the summer. Melanie Amri, Benjamin Judge, Nija Dalal, Shabnam Younus and David Day read a wonderful collection of tales from the heart. David Day captivated the room with a tale from his youth while Benjamin Judge reduced more than a few onlookers to tears with a poignant tale about coffee with his late father. You can read all of these excellent stories in their entirety on The Real Story website. Be prepared for sniffles.

The various shortlisted bloggers then took to the stage to read their wares. Tom Mason, Sarah-Clare Conlon and Dave Hartley all shared pieces of flash fiction from the site 330 Words, nominated in the Best Writing category, while Claire Massey enjoyed a captivated audience for a reading off her blog, Gathering Scraps, nominated in the Best New Blog category. Finally, the wonderfully named Benedict le Gauche stepped into the limelight, reeling off an entry to his fabulously witty blog Curriculum Vitae (shortlisted in the Best New Writing category). Laughs were had.

As the evening drew closer to its conclusion, the crowd were treated to an extract from the witty tongue of Socrates Adams, an author who you’ll be hearing much more from in the coming months. Socrates performed a marvellous reading from his soon-to-be-published debut novel Everything’s Fine, which is released in January.

The business-end of the evening saw the award-winners announced. Hayley Flynn claimed the gong for Best City and Neighbourhood Blog with Skyliner, her fantastic investigation into the history of Manchester’s buildings, while Best New Blog was awarded to David Hartley for his film review site Screen150. The Bests Arts and Culture Blog award, sponsored by the legendary Creative Tourist site, was picked up by Shrieking Violet. Best Personal Blog was claimed by Food Legend and the award for Best Writing On A Blog was split between the aforementioned Benedict le Gauche and http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifBenjamin Judge. The top award, given to the blog with the most votes from the public and judges, was scooped by Dave Hartley for Screen150. The winners, if you’re curious, were awarded a lovely cheque and free domain hosting for a year (courtesy of the folks at 34sp.com).

And it was all wonderful.

Tom Mason is a writer who runs the collaborative flash fiction writing blog 330 Words, winner of the Best New Blog category in the 2010 Manchester Blog Awards.

Standing on ceremonies

2011-10-20T17:45:00.002+01:00

Prize Culture?, Tuesday 18th October, 7.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Valerie O'Riordan. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

A couple of hours before this year’s Booker Prize winner is to be announced, The University Of Manchester’s own cabal of bookish experts turns out at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to thrash out the advantages, complications and intricacies of literary prize culture. The debate is all the more timely in that this year’s Booker competition has been dogged by more than the usual speculation, with Dame Stella Rimington, head of the judging panel, announcing that she wanted "readability" (see link), and Jeanette Winterson, responding in the Guardian, saying that, in contrast, great literature ought to demand "time and effort" (see link). What’s happening? cry the commentators. What’s the remit of literary prizes? Have they replaced critics as the arbiters of public taste? Have the publishers’ publicity machines obliterated the rewarding of quality? Do we really need the Booker? Never fear, dear reader – our panel has stepped boldly into the breach to figure it all out.

The event’s facilitated by journalist Michael Taylor, and joining him are most of the staff of the University’s Centre For New Writing – Vona Groarke, MJ Hyland, Ian McGuire and John McAuliffe – as well as Jerome de Groot, Senior Lecturer in the English Department; between them, we’ve got poets and novelists, academics, literary prize judges and prize-winners – including, in Hyland, a former Booker shortlistee. Jerome de Groot is first to the microphone: he starts out by saying that the Booker Prize has, in the UK, created a market for books that wouldn’t otherwise have gained any traction; that it has contributed to the development of "serious literary fiction" as a genre; that it has educated and enfranchised the reading public. It also, he says, gives us an insight into publishing as an industry – here, the Booker and its associated yearly media furore reveal the marketing, the commercialisation and the cultural capital that fire that industry. But, he reminds us, we ought to recognise that this is what we’ve allowed publishing to become; the Booker isn’t the engine that’s warped an otherwise "pure" literary entity.

Next up is Vona Groarke, who’s determined to educate us on the judging process itself. Want to win a poetry prize? Vona’s recommendations include: suffer a convenient bereavement and write a whole book about it; be as young and attractive as possible; be socially aware, but not – horror! – politically definitive; be cynical, but not too cynical – you’ve got to seem heartfelt, after all. And the judging panel itself? Watch out for hung juries, nepotism, king-makers and the ill-informed. She’s not all doom and witticisms, of course – she points out this year’s Nobel Winner (Tomas Transtromer) as an example of a deserved win – but she also says that there are problems inherent in panel-judging procedures, like the Booker’s; while outstandingly excellent texts can win, it’s the outstandingly unobjectionable that tend to survive the group-judging gauntlet. MJ Hyland (shortlisted in 2006 for Carry Me Down) agrees with this; the book that the prize committee objects to least is the one that tends to win, she says, before reading an excerpt from a John McGahern essay that backs this up. Later, she adds that, despite this, we need more prizes, simply because they determine book-buyers' lists and make a substantial difference to authors’ sales; prizes, she says, are a necessary evil, because very few writers can make a living from their art.

Ian McGuire – novelist and lecturer – says there’s never a definitive answer as to why or how one book can be judged better than another; when assessing fiction, he says, all we can hope for is a clumsy and subtle attempt to sift until a winner emerges. The criteria for excellence aren’t hard and fast, but there is a hierarchy, and you can notice it. He goes on to talk about literary value and how we can find it – the influence of professional reviewers or critics and English departments has decreased lately, as online criticism and literary prizes have gained popularity. Critical theory isn’t as influential as it once was, and academia doesn’t, any more, have the language to assess what’s good. If literary values are still important, various voices need to be heard to contribute to the discussion, and the voices of the English departments aren’t as loud, any more, as they need to be. Returning to the Booker, McGuire adds that this year’s criterion of "readability" equates to a middlebrow shortlist.

John McAuliffe launches straight in with an attack on the quality of recent Booker winners – (Aravind Adiga, Kiran Desai, John Banville) compared to what he reckons were more worthy winners (Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie) back in the early days of the Prize. Now, he says, the Booker isn’t rewarding original voices, and he cited Patrick DeWitt’s The Sister Brothers as an example, saying that isn’t a patch on Kevin Barry’s City Of Bohane, which went unrecognised by the judges. The Booker’s a publicity machine geared towards the Christmas market, and the book-buyers’ focus on the shortlist means that other texts – Barry’s novel, as well as new works by Dermot Healy, Ali Smith and even former winner, Alan Hollinghurst – as good as vanish.

Prizes are given out, as Groarke said, by committee, and for less than encouraging reasons – it’s somebody’s turn because they’re old, because they wrote about tigers, because nobody violently disliked their book. He finishes by saying things aren’t as bleak for poetry – the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize bear equal weight, and there’s a lively magazine culture that keeps literary debate alive.

Now the discussion’s thrown open to the floor: one person remarks that people might buy the prize-winners, but they might not actually read them – how do we know which books will stand the test of time? Vona Groarke replies that we’re lucky, really, if we get one remarkable book a decade, so if some prize-winners are less than admirable, that’s OK; responding again to Dame Rimington, she says, "What’s really readable is really good writing, Quality is readable, mediocrity is boring." Another audience member asks what will fill the gap, if literary criticism is in the doldrums; the panel talk about literary festivals, which allow for public, interactive literary criticism, and blogs, which contribute to the democratisation of criticism.

And that’s more or less that – an engaging debate, an informed audience and a blogger balancing a baby on her knee. But, you ask – the Booker winner? Well, it’s Julian Barnes, of course, with The Sense Of An Ending. As our panellists agreed, they were bound to hand it over – he is getting on in years.

Valerie O'Riordan is a Manchester-based writer, and she blogs at Not Exactly True.

Dramatic cause

2011-10-20T15:35:00.000+01:00

Face 2 Face with Stephen Butchard, Tuesday 18th October, 7pm, Quay House, MediaCityUK

Words by Guy Garrud.

Rain lashes across a city in gridlock. Weary commuters trapped in their cars inch ever closer to their homes while some make their way by tram and foot and car inwards to the glimmering expanse of the BBC’s new Salford centre at the (coincidentally named) MediaCity.

I feel the warm air and embarrassment colour my cheeks as I try and explain to the man at reception what I’m there for and that, despite my name not being printed on one of the special badges, I am a blogger, and even dare to use the word "the". I’m handed a Visitor badge and escorted through an airlock and into the lift to the fifth floor where there’s a positive scrum at the bar while people wait eagerly for the main event. Beyond the windows the redeveloped Salford Quays spreads out in all directions, myriad lights rippling through the rain-spattered glass.

Eventually we’re ushered through to the seats facing a rather stylish purple and black stage complete with lectern, comfy grey chairs and a coffee table. Brimming with confidence I sit towards the middle of the front row. Behind me a woman sets herself up with a phonetic keyboard which clacks quietly throughout the event.

For the uninitiated, Stephen Butchard is a screenwriter who has penned a selection of hard-hitting, deep and sometimes positively grim dramas. Notable among these, and dwelt on this evening, are House Of Saddam, depicting the rise, reign and ruin of Saddam Hussein; Five Daughters, telling the story of the victims of the Ipswich serial murders, and Stolen, which follows three victims of human trafficking. All good hardy fair, and seemingly at odds with the casually dressed man who soon occupies one of the comfy chairs looking ready for a chat with Ross or Parkinson.

The evening begins with a video clip of some of his work followed by an interview by mistress of ceremonies Kate Roland. It starts off a little awkwardly and those at the back struggle to hear above the distant hubbub of Beeb towers, but the comfy chairs are soon replaced with tall stools and as Butchard talks about how he first got into stage productions, then the step to television, he grows more relaxed.

Nobody seems to have told Butchard that you can’t just go from being an engineer to writing plays; that you have to write what you’re asked to and make it fit the time slot you’re given. Most of all nobody seems to have told him that you can’t write stuff about dictators and serial killers and slavery yet still be so cheerful all the time. Not that any of this seems to have stopped him and his obvious enthusiasm finally drives him from his seat altogether as he wanders about the stage, moving closer to audience members as we move onto the Q&A part of the evening. The intensity of his gaze and the sheer energy seeping from every pore acts to fill the room with an inexplicable sense of fun and positivity, in spite of the subject matter.

At different points Butchard talks about cannabis-farming, the impact of News At Ten being moved, the similarities between tribalism and the Mafia, and transferring skills gained working on the Beijing underground to television production, yet all without thing seeming to lurch from topic to topic and, by the end of two hours, I’m struggling to see where the time has gone.

Afterwards I switch my phone back on. Ten missed calls and two angry voicemails... Worth it!

Guy Garrud is a Manchester-based writer, blogger and baker-about-town. His words and confections have made regular appearances at Bad Language’s open mic nights and he has had scribblings posted on Manchester Blog Awards winners Screen 150 and 330 Words.

Poems from home and away

2011-10-20T12:56:00.005+01:00

Sean O'Brien & John McAuliffe, Monday 17th October, 6.30pm, Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama

Words by Catherine Fearn. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

Clad in zinc like a huge roof tile, some might say that the Martin Harris Centre lacks the gravitas associated with other established poetry venues across the city such as St Anne’s Church, the Cathedral or Whitworth Hall. But once inside the 150-seat theatre, it’s easy to see, or rather hear, why the venue has become a favourite place for the MLF to hold its poetry readings.

In 2009 the Irish poets Michael Longley and Tom French graced the Martin Harris Centre for an evening of poetry, and then at last year’s festival the poet émigré Seamus Heaney took to the lectern at Whitworth Hall. Can you spot the MLF theme that’s emerging here?

John McAuliffe is the latest Irish poet to showcase his works at an MLF event, when usually he’s the one introducing the Irish poets. Luckily for McAuliffe, Vona Groarke was on hand to introduce the poet from Kerry, and the other highly acclaimed poet of the evening, Sean O’Brien.

At first it might appear (and hear) like McAuliffe and O’Brien are an unlikely pairing, but what unites the poets in their latest collections is an interest for exploring what it is to be away from something you love, be this a person, place or thing.

Of All Places is McAuliffe’s third collection which locates Ireland firmly at its heart. The volume balances between "home poems" and "travelling poems", and there’s also an argument for including "Manchester poems". McAuliffe received a glowing introduction from Groarke who said:
“We hardly need to introduce John; he’s a gifted teacher, generous colleague and a good friend. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and a boundless appreciation of good writing.”

McAuliffe’s recital began with the eponymously titled Of All Places, shortly followed by another home poem called Badgers, which recounts the story of Des O’Hare, an Irish republican paramilitary also known as the “Border Fox”. The poem looked at the transition from normal childhood anxieties to an awareness of deep-rooted political unrest.

Many of the poems which McAuliffe recited held a fascination for the everyday which he contrasted to poignant events. In Aerialists, the death of a circus performer a day after the poet had bought tickets to the show had an unexpected effect on him, while in Batman Returns McAuliffe depicted the time when a science lab his wife worked in was transformed into a film set. The poet’s obsession with contrasting the humdrum to the poignant came to the fore in Week Two, an apocalyptic poem which he described as “the imminent doom of things not yet gone”.

Perhaps the most visually arresting of McAuliffe’s poems from the evening was Transfers, which depicted the auction of Ireland’s state art collection on 24th November 2010. The poem had at its heart the theme of separation as it recalled the paintings that were dispersed across the globe. McAuliffe’s recital finally ended with A Midgey, a short poem that evoked the same warm feeling as drinking a glass of wine.

Sean O’Brien (pictured) raised a glass to Manchester by commenting on how well received his poetry always is by the city’s audiences. His latest collection, November, mixes places and memory with a dash of the absurd, and among the first poems he recited were The Thing, Collaboration and The Muse. In Josie, O’Brien recalled his earliest memory of a girl reaching out her hands towards him who was, “seen perfectly once / then never again”.

The mystery surrounding Josie represents an innocence and love which the poet can’t recover from, and the irrecoverable was also felt in a touching elegy he read out for his mother, and another for a friend. O’Brien commented towards the end of the recital that, “Elegy is dialogue. You know what the other person is going to say, and you have to leave room for them to say it.” In his echoing deep voice, O’Brien also recited two further memory poems from November, Great Junction Street and Narbonne.

To lighten the tone, O’Brien also included humorous, and at times, absurd poems including The Plain Truth Of Marmite and Counting The Rain, a poem about having OCD which began with the line “Check the gas and hide the back door key” and ended with a command to re-count the raindrops: “Now go outside again, and do it properly”.
By the time the recital had finished, O’Brien would certainly have had his hands full counting the raindrops, as the streets of Manchester were awash with rain. Over the course of the evening McAuliffe and O’Brien had certainly exemplified Vora Groarke’s introductory observations that “poetry takes risks with language and amplifies of our experience of what contemporary poetry can do and be”.

Catherine Fearn writes a blog called The Poplar Tree – one of Manchester’s literature-orientated blogs, which includes editorial features on authors, reviews of books, films and anything in between, such as TV programmes and current affairs.

A passionate woman

2011-10-20T12:44:00.001+01:00

Hallie Rubenhold: Mistress Of My Fate, Monday 17th October, 1pm, Becker Room, City Library

Words by Laura Maley. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

Arriving at the rather grand Becker Room in the City Library, I watch as the room fills with people (mainly women) to hear historian and broadcaster Hallie Rubenhold discuss her debut novel, Mistress Of My Fate, as part of Manchester Literature Festival. The novel is the first in a series, The Confessions Of Henrietta Lightfoot, though Rubenhold has previously written studies of Georgian low-life, The Covent Garden Ladies and Lady Worsley’s Whim.

Rubenhold’s interest in history comes in part from her British father and regular visits to these shores, discovering rich culture and history. As she points out, even the Becker Room will have seen some interesting sights over the years. Growing up in LA, she was acutely aware of a lack of history in her early life, before her postgraduate career brought her an MA and then a PhD from the University of Leeds. She welcomes the transition from non-fiction to fiction as “very liberating”, embracing the freedom to create and speculate – within the parameters of the time period.

Growing up familiar with the history of the American War of Independence, Rubenhold describes that period of turmoil as “an adolescence for the Western world”, with a youthful energy and a fight against the established order of things; but coming out of the period in a more stable way.

Setting the scene for the novel, Rubenhold reads an excerpt hinting at a questionable past and an uncertain future - the dark edge between the London underworld and country house glamour is an important theme in the novel. In fact, in the interests of learning something new every day, I can now confirm that I feel fully appraised of the system of rankings within prostitution, from mistresses to park walkers and street walkers to disease-ridden "bunters" – with others in between.

The conversation refers often to Rubenhold’s academic life and how much it influences her other work. In fact, asking Rubenhold her thoughts on historical inaccuracies clearly hits on a pet hate as she replies, “It irks me!”, and tells us that – in her own experience - television commissioners don’t always have respect for history, some screenwriters have no historical experience and, worst of all, some programme-makers assume that the audience is too stupid to realise (she means you, 1917-set Downton Abbey, with your electric curling tongs...).

An audience question about the popularity of historical fiction sees Rubenhold’s academic passion rear its head straightaway as she condemns the lack of variety in most historic fiction: “It’s all kings, mistresses and wars – there’s very little variety. The most groundbreaking work in the field of history is totally different to what’s on the shelves in supermarkets. Worse, there seems to be a worrying trend of learning and entertainment being deemed entirely incompatible.”

When talk turns to her reading habits when younger, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise - given her chosen specialism - to learn that Rubenhold has high regard for Wuthering Heights, Les Misérables and Gone With The Wind. With Henrietta Lightfoot, she hopes to emulate the grand panorama – blending the personal, social and political contexts - albeit over the course of more than one novel.

Before we reluctantly return to the 21st century, Rubenhold gives us a sneak preview of Henrietta’s adventures. In The French Lesson (publication in 2013), Henrietta is living in Paris (during the Terror) and the third novel sees her in Italy, just before it falls to Napoleon.

Although transport delays mean a late start to this fun and engaging session, Rubenhold’s passion for history and literature is clear. A lively discussion about the potential pitfalls of combining and adapting the two lead to a lively lunchtime and eager anticipation of Henrietta Lightfoot’s further gallivanting.

Laura Maley lives and works in Manchester and blogs about arts and culture at Cultural Shenanigans. You can follow her on Twitter @elle_c_emm

Spanish highs

2011-10-20T12:03:00.004+01:00

Victor Rodriguez Nunez with Grevel Lindop, Friday 14th October, 6.30pm, Instituto Cervantes

Words by Kate Feld.

I came to the event having never read a word of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Nuñez’s work and left determined to change that. His poems were compelling, deceptively simple, powerful and occasionally dreamlike. He generously read one of the poems of his host, UK poet Grevel Lindop, translated into Spanish, which I also enjoyed very much. I don’t understand Spanish so it was a little strange to hear the poet read his work followed by Lindop reading the translation. Translating poetry, a medium that turns so much upon exact word choices and precision of both meter and meaning, must be devilishly hard.

Questions from the audience provided some interesting revelations from the poet on this theme, most surprisingly we learned that he doesn’t write a line in Spanish if he doesn’t think it would read well in English. Such a revelation would make native tongue purists throw up their hands in shock, but coming from a poet who has lived in America for a number of years, and is married to his translator, it is perhaps not as surprising. His reflections on varying shades of meaning and expression in different languages were compelling, especially a moving anecdote in which his young son, who had until then spoken Spanish with his father, asked to speak to him in English because part of his soul was in the language. If I have any regrets about the evening, it is that there was not more time for such discussion with the audience.

The second part of the evening was the launch of Of Ink And Light, an exhibition of the powerful portrait photographs of Daniel Mordzinski, who has spent his professional life photographing the great voices of Spanish language literature. Standouts for me were his photographs of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The exhibition runs until December 14, and is well worth a trip to Instituto Cervantes.

Kate Feld is a writer and organiser of the Manchester Blog Awards and Real Story project, which has just gone live following the announcement of the winners at the Blog Awards on Wednesday 19th October.

Not lost in translation

2011-10-19T17:10:00.004+01:00

European Short Stories: Bjarte Breiteig & Thijs de Boer, Tuesday 18th October, 6pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Nick Garrard.

Tonight’s event brings a cosmopolitan air to the red brick walls of the Burgess Foundation. Not only are we graced with two rising stars of European literature but, as they read their chosen pieces in their mother tongues, live English translations are streamed on a projector screen behind them. Rather than being a distraction, this makes for a curiously immersive experience, sidestepping the aridity which can sometimes haunt live readings and offering a respectful nod to the authors’ particular languages. As each of tonight’s readers picks their way through their words, there’s a curious pleasure in tracing their progress and reflecting on the way each un-translated phrase echoes or diverges from its English equivalent.

In the post-reading Q&A, both authors refute the idea of a "single European style". There are too many cultures, they say: there are no "European stories", just stories, diverse enough in themselves. As a definition this hardly seems necessary – the samples we hear from their two collections prove there are stirringly different talents abroad on the continent.

Thijs de Boer goes first. A young, exceptionally tall writer from Holland, he cut his teeth as an architecture student. Perhaps I make too much of this as it’s the last detail I pluck from his biography before it’s whisked off the screen, but it seems to me that his writing is aptly preoccupied with ideas of space and alienation. The first of his two pieces describes a grotesque retirement home where dwarves skip maniacally down the corridors and the elderly sit upright in bed and hum to themselves without break. It’s an inventive bit of descriptive prose and puts me in mind of Kafka or the Modernist excesses of Bruno Schulz. There’s a rather more contemporary vein of black humour curling through his words too, as in his second piece, Ketamine, in which two drug-addled brothers lose their mother’s gravestone to a bad hand of cards. And to think, the Dutch seemed like such an easygoing lot.

Bjarte Breiteig is at the other end of the spectrum. His writing is spare and controlled and more than a little brutal. He cites Hemingway and Carver as key influences, along with a rash of Nordic countrymen whose names unfortunately zip past my ignorant ears. He reads just one piece, titled You Best Run. It’s the story of a young couple and the escalating cruelty of their curdled relationship. Here, the streamed translation works well, each new page bringing a fresh act of viciousness. The audience is clearly gripped and it’s a pleasing relief in the Q&A afterwards when Breiteig reveals himself to be as bright eyed and chirpy as his characters are tortured and withdrawn. "I used to write nice people," he says, "my first collection was all about them." The audience resolves as one to check.

My favourite quote of the night comes – appropriately – as the conclusion draws near. Jim Hinks of Comma Press, chairing the discussion, asks Breiteig about the endings of his stories. Why does he choose to leave them so unresolved? Breiteig thinks for a moment then smiles.

"Well," he says, "if you have a closed ending then you give people closure." He laughs, a little too convincingly.

Nick Garrard lives and works in Manchester. You can follow him on Twitter @havershambler.

When poets reflect art

2011-10-19T17:07:00.004+01:00

Ford Madox Brown: Image To Word - Jean Sprackland, Tuesday 18th October, 6pm, Manchester Art Gallery

Words by Thom Cuell.

Image To Word is one of the most intriguing events of Manchester Literature Festival, giving attendees the chance to hear original poetry in an unusual setting, with the added benefit of having a near-private viewing of the excellent collections of the Manchester Art Gallery. This year’s event ties in with the Ford Madox Brown retrospective, an appropriate choice given Madox Brown’s own literary connections.

Remembered as an inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Ford Madox Brown took much of his own inspiration from literature, especially the works of Shakespeare and Byron, and created paintings weaving writers such as Chaucer into the fabric of English history. One of his descendants went on to make his own impact in the field of Modernist literature, under the name Ford Madox Ford.

After having the opportunity to take in the exhibition, we are greeted by the curator, who explains the purpose of the event – by inviting a poet, Jean Sprackland, to respond to the paintings, the organisers hope to inspire a new interpretation of historic works. Jean herself admits to being "not at all an expert" on Madox Brown; she is looking to create a "parallel experience", using a variety of styles and forms, as the painter did over the course of his career. Sprackland avoids using Madox Brown’s more literary paintings for her inspiration, in favour of creating her own narrative from his portraits and depictions of modern life.

Sprackland has selected six paintings to respond to, and delivers each poem in front of the relevant piece; turning the event into a promenade, the poet becomes a tour guide, helping to open our eyes to hidden meanings within the paintings, using her words to give us a new interpretation beyond what may be found in the guidebooks. The frequent moves create a communal atmosphere, and encourage conversations between audience members, while the opportunity to get up close to the pieces on display is a rare treat.

The first painting Sprackland chooses is The English Boy, a portrait of Madox Brown’s young son. The painting is a pastiche of royal portraits, showing a boy of seven brandishing toys as though they were an orb and sceptre. Sprackland’s response effectively captures the independence and self-possession of the child, and a strong identification with nature, all qualities shared by the iconoclastic Pre-Raphaelites. We move on to Take Your Son, Sir, a painting Madox Brown never finished. The painting itself is open to multiple interpretations; a smile on the mother’s face could also be a grimace, the baby, a symbol of new life, appears sickly. The unfinished and undecided nature of the piece is reflected in Sprackland’s dream narrative, which takes a dark view of the source material, imagining the painter with a sense of lurking regret.

Not all of the audience are familiar with Madox Brown’s work, but as we move from piece to piece, you can overhear whispers of awed admiration at the painter’s technique and vision. The third piece, The Last Of England, is one of Madox Brown’s best-known works. The painting depicts a couple emigrating from England, with Maddox Brown himself as the male partner. Behind the central figures, rowdy characters crowd into a constrained space, and the overbearing tone is one of discomfort, and failure. Sprackland, however, sees redemption in the hand of an infant poking from beneath the woman’s shawl. She captures the clamour of the piece with evocative use of metaphor, describing the jitters of the boat and the muscle of the sea.

From here, we move onto Madox Brown’s other signature piece, Work. This painting is full and rich, bursting with noise and colour. We see the contrast of wealth and poverty, mental and physical labour, compressed by an urban environment and the confusion of the industrial city. Sprackland compares the broken-up road in the centre of the painting to the breakdown of the pre-industrial social order. This theme is continued in the fifth poem, inspired by The Hayfield, where Sprackland imagines the aftermath of rural work, comparing farmhands to the navvies of Work: "We worked that field like a factory floor… carried the weight of August on our backs."

Finally, Sprackland leads us to a portrait of the Bromley family. Here, the poet attempts to disrupt the traditions of the family portrait through surreal language: "sat under a blue-enough tree… you could practically smell the brothers". This mirrors the way in which Madox Brown’s lively, informal painting subverted the stiffness of Victorian photograph portraits.

Words To Image was a fascinating opportunity to gain a new insight into the works of a magnificent painter, and enjoy poetry in a unique environment. These events should become a regular fixture at the Manchester Literature Festival.

Thom Cuell writes about books, art and theatre at the Workshy Fop blog.

Faith restored in poetry

2011-10-19T16:55:00.003+01:00

Cathedral Poetry Prize: Jeffrey Wainwright, Tuesday 18th October, 2pm, Manchester Cathedral

Words by Joely Black. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

It’s probably a bit odd for an atheist to select this particular event to review, especially two years in a row. Arriving at the Cathedral on a windy, rainy Manchester lunchtime, I can’t help but feel like the outsider, the ticking bomb; the terrorist in the midst of the audience when I come to events with a religious bent, like Al Pacino stepping into the cathedral in Devil’s Advocate and touching his finger to the holy water in the font.

Yet, since the Cathedral Poetry Competition began holding its prize-giving as a formal event within the Literature Festival last year, I’ve chosen to review it. Last year because nobody else had selected it, and this year, I chose to do it again almost as an act of ownership. I could remember sitting in the Jesus Chapel and listening to the poets read their work, the thrill at the prize-giving, and wondered that people could miss out on this treasure of the festival.

As Rachel Mann, the poet in residence at the Cathedral, tells me, poetry can express something of our lives that nothing else can. The poets submitting their work come from all walks of life, have all manner of experiences to share, and relate in their words the great variety of human experience. They give words to the inexpressible, find the mysterious, the surprising, and the funny in every little nook of life.

We begin, as ever, with a few words and poems from the judge. This year, Jeffrey Wainwright reads from his forthcoming book, The Reasoner. His work for this collection gives me the impression of a man looking upward, regarding the heavens and wondering. It evokes the true spirit of the prize, which is not about the religious in the dogmatic sense, but the religious that is about a sense of wonder at the world and everything in it. Rather like poetry, in fact.

Many of the chosen poems reflect the confusion of emotions that follow death, from the struggle to live with the hole left in our lives by the loss of a loved one to the bizarre little behaviours of the grief-stricken, when meaning is turned on its head and the insignificant becomes most powerful. Of the commended poems, Marguerite Wood, Gillie Robie, Ruth Hobson and Susan Bedford read their selected work. Each one is a window on a life, a single moment, from Wood’s memories stealing back into her life to the buried spider of Robie’s Transmigration.

Wainwright’s introduction explains that he chose poems that, no matter how many times he read them, kept their air of mystery and surprise. Satyadaka’s The Man Who Gave You That Old Map, which took third prize, put me in mind of the wedding guest who, after meeting the ancient mariner, is left completely changed by the experience of hearing such a story. It relates the struggle to understand the inexplicable related in such perfectly prosaic language - the almost throwaway line “you keep on with it anyway” coming with a shrug of the shoulders that some things are always going to present mountains to climb in understanding.

Joel’s Ward, the second prize poem by Martin Eggleton, came from personal experience of his struggle with cancer treatment. The vital, visceral quality of hospital life, every man on the ward communicating with his own personal god in the midst of suffering, mingles with the lucid, transcendent moment of delirium seamlessly. Finally, the winner James Harpur is an established Irish poet whose Finbarr And The Serpent Of Gougaine Barra is a tight reckoning of the faith for the saint, a dark and fantastical exploration of human struggle, whether with the natural world or the spiritual.

After the event, the poets and audience mingle in the visitors centre with an excellent spread put on by the cafe below. Speaking with the poets, it is clear that they use this medium as a means to explore the reality of their lived experience, especially as it touches those great areas that remain mysterious, or shrouded with emotional and psychological uncertainty. Regardless of faith, or lack thereof, some things in life elicit such emotion and the need to express it, to bear witness to it, and this is what the contributors to the Poetry Prize do so well.

Joely Black is an author and writer living in Manchester. She writes for various online and offline magazines and has completed a series of fantasy novels under the title Amnar. She runs a local book club as part of the wider Greater Manchester Skeptics Society and has given talks there and elsewhere on various subjects.

Criminal minds

2011-10-19T16:43:00.002+01:00

Crime In A Cold Climate: KO Dahl, Thomas Enger & Yrsa Sigardurdottir, Monday 17th October, 7.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Thom Cuell. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

Torrential rain bounces off the paving slabs outside, and cloaked figures huddle in dark street corners. A group of strangers huddles together in the chapel-like confines of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The perfect setting for a talk by three Scandinavian crime writers.

Although the three featured writers may not be household names in the UK, they represent a burgeoning genre. We can watch Scandinavian crime adaptations on the TV (Wallander and The Killing) or at the cinema (The Millennium Trilogy), and billboard adverts for the latest Jo Nesbo can be found at train stations across the country. It’s not all about blockbusters either; as KO Dahl points out, there are around 40 new Scandinavian writers being published each year, and every large bookshop will have a Scandinavian crime section.

The event is set up as a panel session, hosted by Barry Forshaw, an expert who has written books on the genre. Each writer is given a brief introduction, but there are no readings this evening – unfortunately this makes it difficult for attendees who are interested in the subject, but have not read the individual authors, to get a feel for their work. It is interesting, though, to hear three writers discussing the writing process, their early attempts at writing, and their attempts to carve a niche for themselves in the genre fiction market.

It is surprising, for example, to hear KO Dahl admit that he "doesn’t really know" Frank Frølich, the character who has featured in eight of his novels to date, and that he sees murders as a means to an end. All three writers also reject the genre clichés of investigators with superhuman abilities, and drunken, depressive detectives. To stand out from the crowd, they react in different ways, focusing on female lawyers, or policemen who live with their parents.

The star of the evening is undoubtedly Yrsa Sigardurdottir, who charms the crowd with her witty comments. When asked whether Scandinavian crime writing was inherently left wing, she replies that in her native Iceland, "corruption is so low-level and boring – no one would kill for that type of corruption". Later, she is asked about her approach to sex scenes, and responds "Iceland is so small that everyone I know reads my books – so my main character cannot have sex, because people associate her with me."

The authors also talk interestingly about the process of having their work translated, and the need to let go of control and trust your translators. They reveal that the Scandinavian vocabulary is less broad than English, making their work occasionally appear stilted when we read it.

There are some missed opportunities, however. Although the authors are engaging when discussing the genre in general, they are not well known enough to carry the audience when talking about their own work, some of which was not even available in English. I also found it strange that the subject of Anders Breivik was not raised; fortunately, as the audience and authors congregated in the bar afterwards, I was able to ask Dahl if he thought there would be a literary response to the events of July 22. He replied that he knew of books being written at the moment which dealt with a Breivik-like central character.

Overall, the event was an interesting introduction to a genre of fiction writing which is enjoying almost unprecedented popularity at the moment, and it was illuminating to see the authors describe the merits of crime writing. For Dahl, crime writing is the perfect way of exploring society, cutting across class divides; the murders are simply a mechanism for creating interest in a character, and the investigation allows the reader a complete overview of an individual’s life and loves. All three rejected charges of goriness or sensationalism. If there was anything unsatisfying about the event, it was the struggle for the host to find a balance between his expert knowledge of the texts, and the more casual interest of many attendees. Still, the Waterstone’s table was doing good business afterwards, and the authors were signing plenty of books for happy attendees.

Thom Cuell writes about books, art and theatre at the Workshy Fop blog.

The Empire strikes back

2011-10-19T14:03:00.003+01:00

Navtej Sarna and Shrabani Basu, Monday 17th October,6pm, Event Room, Waterstone's Deansgate

Words by Richard Jackson.

On a typically English, damp Monday night in Manchester – the rain’s distracting prattle amplified by the large, thin windows, of Waterstone's event area – a room-filling audience gathers. Representing a microcosm of Manchester’s magnificent multicultural heritage, ahead of everyone awaits an insightful and compelling evening: a discussion of the literature that emerges when the historical world collides with the fictional, where there flamboyant Indian fare of Queen Victoria’s royal court is brought to one of the main commercial thoroughfares of the city.

Introductions are made and, led by Jerome de Groot - lecturer in English at The University Of Manchester and author of The Historical Novel – Navtej Sarna (pictured) and Shrabani Basu begin with two short readings from their respective works, The Exile and Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant. Astute planning comes into play; considering the similarities in historical context – for both books concern British-Indian colonial history – Navtej Sarna, in adherence to chronology (it is an event that concerns historical fiction, after all), reads first, choosing to narrate a passage that links with Shrabani Basu’s subject matter, in that it concerns Queen Victoria.

Encountering a much younger Victoria in The Exile, Sarna’s book concerns the political awakening of the last Maharaja of Punjab, Duleep Singh, whom – when only an 11-year-old boy – was forced to sign away his kingdom and its treasures to British control. He was transported to live in England aged 16, and the novel - described by Jerome de Goot as “a story of political experience shot through with the oblique melancholia of exile” – is told in Duleep’s own voice and four of his contempories, details his growing disillusionment and growth as a Sikh rebel. This feeling exemplified in Navtej Sarna’s tone, reading as Duleep Singh: “Mrs Fagin. That is what I once called Queen Victoria. The biggest pickpocket of them all. Stolen kingdoms, stolen jewels. Smuggled away to her by her loyal viceroys, men like Dalhousie, with immaculate records and panegyrics.”

In contrast, Shrabani Basu presents a less confrontational story of a young Indian gentleman in Victorian English society (set years later after Duleep Singh’s story, in the time of the queen’s golden jubilee). Victoria & Abdul is about the handsome Abdul Karim, a servant who became a close confident and teacher of Victoria’s, who later became a controversial figure in her court.

Unknown to me, and I assume other members of the audience, judging by the laughter and gasps heralded from Basu’s explanation the relationship, one of the highlights of the evening is learning the almost surreptitious details of Victoria’s life - a controversial figure of "Empire", who highlights the problems inherent in tackling the past. However, the obvious warmth Shrabani Basu feels for the deceased monarch is both surprising (initially anyway) and touching: “I had this impression, and most of us do back in India, that Queen Victoria is very dull: dressed in black, always in mourning, whose most famous line is ‘we are not amused’. So, representing the Empire. But when I was researching this, I found that she was really passionate.” A discovery to which the author later adds: “Then this young man arrives, and suddenly Queen Victoria gets a new lease of life. Her whole life changes; suddenly, she’s eating curries, suddenly she’s learning Urdu. Suddenly, the Empire, and everything Indian, is all around her.”

Throughout the evening, there is a friendly and respectful dynamic between the two authors. Individually, they both speak elegantly and with authority. But it is during the discussion and resultant questions that follow their readings, that the humorous and absorbing flare each holds truly shines. As a pair, they bounce ideas and reciprocal comments off one another, contrasting the histories laid out in each book, and later – as the evening moves on – using this energy to tackle the core problem of when history meets fiction.

On this issue, they are asked about the challenges that writers face when writing about "real people" and the ethics of this pursuit. Navtej Sarna highlights that this is the most difficult aspect of writing historical fiction, Shrabani Basu agreeing. The challenge lies behind the question of where does the fact end and history begin? When approaching writing of this nature, it is important to keep true to the facts, without changing anything. However, a novelist has the right to make a story more interesting; through imagining what their characters may be thinking, in turn adopting their voice, while also perhaps expanding upon the role of minor characters, for which no historical or primary source evidence remains.

While this topic ended the evening, on a concluding note, these following words from Shrabani Basu seem particularly apt: “You’re telling a story. To me, it’s not about the stringing of letters together or journals. You have to bring it alive, you are telling a story, for me this really works. The truth works or me. If you tell a story well, it will work.”

Richard Jackson is a PhD student interested in Central and Eastern European history, literature and culture. His blog, Lemberik, concerns the issues of minority populations in this region and he can be followed on Twitter via @lemberik.

Get thee to a nunnery!

2011-10-18T16:45:00.002+01:00

Sacred Hearts: Sarah Dunant & Musica Secreta, Sunday 16th October, 7.30pm, Manchester Cathedral

Words by Sarah Holland. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

It’s a chilly Sunday night, yet tonight’s packed location has a warm and intimate cosiness about it, a sanctuary from the outside. The beauteous and perfectly appropriate setting of Manchester Cathedral will surely enhance the experience of tonight’s performance, set in a convent in 16th-century Italy. It’s radiant and ethereal in the evening candlelight.

Sarah Dunant is the bestselling author of The Birth Of Venus and In The Company Of The Courtesan. Tonight’s event is a semi-dramatised reading of her new, widely acclaimed novel Sacred Hearts. The book transports the reader back to 1570, a time of patriarchy when women were unable to choose their future, being forced to marry an eligible suitor or sent away to a convent. Shockingly, over half of noblewomen became nuns, and as Dunant states in the novel’s introduction: "not all of them went willingly".

The novel’s heroine, Serafina, is a fiery 16-year-old girl from Milan. By refusing to marry her suitor due to a passionate yet forbidden love for another man, she is confined to the convent of Santa Caterina in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. Included in her dowry is the offer of her exceptional vocal talent, to which she is expected to apply for divine worship.

The only love Serafina may indulge in is the spiritual kind. She must become a bride of Christ. Serafina, defiantly, does not take this lightly. Her first night confined in the convent walls results in a rage of despair. The wailing she produces grows so violent that Zuana, the dispensary mistress, "feels it in her stomach as well as her head: as if a wayward troop of devils had forced its way inside the girl’s cell and was even now winding her intestines on a split". Zuana has to sedate her, and a complex friendship develops, Zuana having once been an unwilling nun herself. Her reluctant entrance into the convent spirals a series of engrossing events, including an attempted escape to be with her love.

The performance involves a delicate balance of drama and narration from the book’s passages, by both Dunant and the actors. The audience is instantly immersed into the plot as, after a brief introduction, the actress playing Serafina throws herself to the floor in screaming anguish. She certainly looks perfect for the role. Her flowing, wavy locks radiate elements of the Renaissance. Meanwhile, Deborah Findlay’s lively channelling of the mysterious Suora Magdalena was entertaining; she spoke with vigour and perfectly captured an ancient lady’s cackle.

The evening is a distinctive approach to a reading event. The drama enlivens the literature but does not drown it, and the passages are able to speak for themselves. The event itself is also distinctively atmospheric. Despite such an abundance of attendees, over 400, the air is still and serene as viewers become locked into peaceful silence, captivated by a world unrecognisable from modernity.

The music is the highlight. Fortunately, for a great deal of this evening, Musica Secreta, a group dedicated to performing as women musicians in the 16th and 17th century, grace the audience with their angelic voices. It is calming in contrast to the turbulence of the story, and thus shows a different side to the rigid and claustrophobic life that the novel also explores. Of course, to be forced into a life without mortal love and passion must have been agony for some women, but it could also provide sanctuary from the harsh reality of what would await them outside should they to return without a role.

The couple sat to my side praised how the performance had effectively included the highlights of a large novel in just 90 minutes. They also said it was a shame that the climatic ending wasn’t acted out, but of course this could not be spoiled for future readers. Surveying the surrounding faces, many were mesmerised by the raw musical talent that echoed from the Cathedral walls. For those who had not read Sacred Hearts and may have found the swift pace and characters difficult to follow, the event would have remained a treat regardless.

Sarah Holland recently graduated in English Literature from Sheffield University and now lives in Manchester. She writes about the arts and has a screen blog, Girl On Film.

Two and two is four

2011-10-18T13:20:00.002+01:00

South Asian Writers double bill

Tahmima Anam & Dipika Rai in Conversation with Claire Armitstead, Sunday 16th October, 1pm, Banqueting Room, Town Hall

Words by L.J.Spillane. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

The first instalment of the South Asian Writers double bill is commencing any minute now. Manchester Town Hall’s Banqueting Room is a grand setting. The remarkable arched windows and the noble greens and reds used on the walls house the excited whispers of the attendees while they take their seats.

It is colour that next arouses the senses as Dipika Rai is reading from Someone Else’s Garden, her novel set in rural India. Dipika is giving a rather evocative description of Lati Bai, the protagonist’s mother, giving birth to her last child. Lati Bai prays through labour pains and recalls all the colours she has attached to her children at birth. Colour is ingrained in Indian culture and the landscape, and Lati Bai has given birth many times in the same field at different seasons. It makes perfect sense that one of Lati Bai’s children would be yellow, the colour of mustard seeds. The mood shifts as Lati Bai ponders her situation having given birth to another girl.

Dealing with themes of infanticide, arranged marriages and religion through the female protagonist Mumta, Someone Else’s Garden explores how it is possible that brutal social injustice can occur in the context of spirituality. Dipika explains that the novel is not intended to be forgiving of that brutality, but, in context, allows consideration of the causes which give rise to it. As I’m listening, I’m humbled. The complexities surrounding the issues come to the forefront, as does the universal nature of social pressure and financial hardship.

Tahmima Anam takes to the microphone and is discussing her new novel The Good Muslim. The story is set in the aftermath of war in Bangladesh, and follows a family caught in conflict, namely a sister and brother, Maya and Sohail.

Tahmima is reading a passage from her book in which Sohail’s mother’s defines the moment her son was lost to her, describing the acts of violence he has committed as a guerilla fighter. It is these actions which Sohail himself is struggling to come to terms with, and his doubts steer him to his faith. A rift in his family develops, particularly with his sister Maya who has rejected her faith. Maya is an activist, secular and Marxist, as were both siblings when they were revolutionaries together.
Tahmima raises a significant question about her own work: Who is the good Muslim? She is going on to say that all the characters in the book are Muslim, and it is easy to see one Muslim world. In reality, as people the world over tend to do about all sorts of things, Muslims argue with each other about what their faith means, and some of them reject it, like the character of Maya.

Maya is also struggling to settle back into the ‘smallness’ of life having been a part of something so much bigger than herself. Maya remains an activist in a way that she can be now the war is over, but battles with the difficulties that go along with that.

There are similarities in both Tahmima’s and Dipika’s novels regarding women’s roles in society. A parallel is drawn with British women before and after the Second World War. Someone asks how the writers think their work will be received by different readers, in the UK, in India and Bangladesh. The audience starts to laugh as Tahmima explains that the difference between giving a reading in Manchester and giving a reading in Dhaka is that in Dhaka someone will say “I’m sorry, you got that wrong. The curfew was three not four.” Tahmima goes on to say that people feel very strongly about the time they lived through. They are happy the events are in a book, and are complimentary of the work, but ultimately it’s their story, and they will feel compelled to hone the details of the country and events that belong to them.

The audience is keen to know about the responsibility the writers feel when discussing these difficult themes. Both writers seem to suggest that while journalism allows you to be political, writing a good novel can open people’s hearts. It is certainly true that empathy is a powerful thing. One reader conveys the emotional impact Someone Else’s Garden is having on her and that she is sticking with Mumta’s journey to the end. I think we can safely say that these writers have done their jobs well.

Kishwar Desai and Moni Mohsin in Conversation with Anita Sethi, Sunday 16th October, 2.30pm, Banqueting Room, Town Hall

Words by L.J.Spillane. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

We stay in the same venue for the second part of the South Asian Writers double bill. Manchester Town Hall’s Banqueting Room is as striking as the work of the writers we have heard and are about to hear.

Writer, broadcaster and journalist Anita Sethi is in discussion this afternoon with Kishwar Desai, writer of the novel Witness The Night, and Moni Mohsin, writer of the novel Tender Hooks and The Diary Of A Social Butterfly.

Kishwar is reading from her novel which is set in Punjab. A young girl is accused of killing her family and is placed in judicial custody. An alcoholic Asian female social worker called Simran takes action to unravel the truth about the case.

Kishwar reads beautifully and comically, highlighting the differences in personality between the accused and the social worker. Laughing and applauding, the audience is delighted with Kishwar’s description of Simran, the opposite of what a good woman in her culture should be, cursing and complaining of a banging head after a night of drinking.

When asked about inspiration for writing, Kishwar confesses that as a child her family moved around a lot. Her father was a policeman forever being transferred somewhere else. She says she was always making new friends and reading books. The books she liked most as a child were the books her brother read, featuring cowboys, often in Texas, with some kind of moralistic sheriff who was riding into town and executing justice in impossible situations. This is sounding like the blueprint for Simran — a crusader, a real trooper.

The final writer to speak as part of this double bill is Moni Mohsin. Moni is reading with a different approach to the other writers today. Her style is satirical, using "chutnification" in her language which lightens the mood, yet her work is still dealing with the difficult issues within Pakistan, what can be described as an almost low-level war situation. Tender Hooks examines how life goes on despite these issues, and features a character who believes she is a safe, comfortable distance from the goings-on. Moni also reads from The Diary Of A Social Butterfly, a journal of a privileged woman living in Lahore. Among the imagery I will never forget, because I was laughing so much, is the hilarious illustration of newspaper ads taken out by police. The ads are advising Lahore citizens to be vigilant of people who look a bit fattish in their "top halfs" (suicide vests do nothing for your figure, na), and the young man who had a suitcase lying next to him which the protagonist could swear she heard ticking. Her servants look at her like she is completely "crack" when she tells them she has only just foiled a suicide bomber all by herself.

Growing up on a farm with a poor TV signal, Moni explains that her inspiration is rooted in books and the stories her mother and grandmother told her as a child. She reveals that she comes from a family of mimics, always observing the idiosyncrasies of people. She is interested in uncovering and examining the hypocrisies in life, the contrasts in what people say and what they do, using humour and satire to entertain and inform.

The humour aside, the conversations don’t shy away from the difficult subjects. Both books are united by the word "tender", and the juxtaposition of tenderness with brutality. Kishwar is describing the passion that spurred her into writing her novel, and the mood is reminiscent of Tahmima Anam’s and Dipika Rai’s talk — the novel is empathetically powerful, and it can transcend the caricatures we sometimes become desensitised to through the media.

L.J.Spillane has a writing blog at www.ljspillane.com. You can catch her on Twitter at @LJSpillane.

A real good sport

2011-10-18T12:12:00.002+01:00

Sunday 16th October, 12 noon, Quay House, MediaCityUK

Words by Shirley Kernan.

Tom Palmer wasn’t much of a reader when he was growing up. It wasn’t until the ripe old age of 17 that he found himself bitten by the reading bug, after his mum encouraged him to read about football, to browse football magazines and to read match reports in newspapers.

It is just a throwaway memory, a wisp of a tale that children’s author Palmer imparts to the young, and predominantly male, audience at the Scrum! literary event in the BBC offices at MediaCityUK on a bright Sunday morning. But it is a tale that suits the atmosphere. It helps everyone feel at home, unjudged. Here is a man who is one of us. For, while the audience at Scrum! are young and understandably keen, they are quiet too, politely eager, perhaps just a little bit daunted by the plush newness of their BBC surroundings. Fortunately Palmer, author of two popular football fiction series for children (Football Academy and Foul Play) is the perfect host, offering a gentle mix of education, inspirational literary message (in this case, the merits of reading and writing) and a little bit of fun too.

The event kicks off with the congenial Palmer introducing himself before quickly jumping into audience participation – with a literary theme, of course. First, who likes reading? A few hands tentatively raise but it isn’t looking overly promising. Anyone like rugby? A few more hands but it’s hardly a win. Football? Ah yes, here we go. Hands shoot up with noticeable enthusiasm. What rugby team do you support? Football teams? Soon names are being called out with worldly abandon, teams from Widnes to Newcastle to Barcelona, and of course Manchester’s own obligatory two football clubs, are reported to the encouraging Palmer. Things are starting to warm up. Next is a short quiz, allowing one or two of the young audience members to display a sporting knowledge which is surely beyond their years, before Palmer deftly brings the focus back to the main theme – reading and writing. He chats for a while about how he got into reading, how lucky he feels to be an author, and follows up with a short excerpt from his latest outing – Scrum!, a rugby novel about a boy torn between loyalty to his dad and a relationship with his mum's new husband. The audience giggles mischievously as Palmer cheekily signs off his reading with a joke. Yes, the applause seems to say, you’re definitely one of us.

Without pause for breath, it is time for some fun with the young audience members invited to take part in a penalty shoot-out. Standing in an orderly queue reminiscent of PE class, the participants look nervous but, regardless of victory or disaster, each is roundly applauded. It ends with a tense final. Two lads go head-to-head. Only one can win the coveted trophy, but it is a supportive affair with everyone seemingly pleased merely to have taken part.

And so to the grand finale – the special guests, namely BBC Sports Editor Carl Hicks and Andrew Sheridan from Sale Sharks. Again Palmer gets the ball rolling, encouraging the panel to share their thoughts and experiences, from career beginnings as a sports reporter on a local newspaper (Hicks) through to being inspired by Sting lyrics (Sheridan, who is a singer-songwriter in his spare time). Then it is over to the audience to ask questions, opening the conversation up and providing plenty of opportunities for humour and anecdotes. It is to Palmer’s credit that he successfully keeps the merits of reading and writing to the fore as the conversation meanders off into more sporting territory. Equally to his credit, the younger audience feels comfortable enough in this amiable grouping to open up - to ask questions and shout out answers. This laid-back, easy feel seems to suit the other audience too, the older ones - the parents and assorted friends and relatives ensconced at the back but equally happy to join in with an answer or a suggested “good read”.

Overall Scrum! proves to be a light-hearted, enjoyable event. A genuine love of sport, a desire to encourage and support the next generation and a convivial atmosphere means it would be all too easy to think this was a regular event – a sort of BBC literary training ground for young rugby and footie fans. More importantly, it proves to be an inspiring event. As Carl Hicks points out when asked what is the best thing the Olympics will bring to the UK, it is that young people might realise they too could one day be an athlete, a sports journalist or, perhaps even, an author.

Shirley Kernan is a writer. She Tweets @shirleycurles.

Savage parade

2011-10-18T11:39:00.001+01:00

Portrait Of Music & Words: Manchester Camerata & Michael Symmons Roberts, Saturday 15th October, 7.30pm, Royal Northern College Of Music

Words by Joely Black. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

Have you ever had a moment when it seemed as though some piece of music, some set of words, reached inside of you, read the heart of your being, and expressed it with a beauty you could never possibly imagine? This must have been how the audience felt at the end of Portrait Of Music & Words, performed by the Manchester Camerata on Saturday in the Royal Northern College Of Music’s ultra-modern concert hall.

As part of the Manchester Literature Festival, award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts was asked to produce poems based on a piece of music. This, he tells us at the beginning of his segment, is unusual. It’s more normal for the words to come first, and the music be woven around them. Indeed, he is speaking after we’ve been treated to Mozart’s Alma Grande e Nobil Core, sung by Rebecca. His poetry is surrounded by music, and by the chamber orchestra itself, both physically and metaphorically.

When commissioned, Michael chose Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations as inspiration. Oddly, Les Illuminations was originally inspired by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, so in writing poetry inspired by music itself drawn from words, Michael brought the piece full circle. His four poems of 15 lines each reflect the feeling of the evening as a whole, a mix of the fantastical, chimerical, ethereal, earthy, funny and grief-stricken. Both the poems and their inspiration remind the listener of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast in their multi-faceted portrait of a crazy, wild, circus of a world.

Michael’s four pieces focus on the Hotel Splendide, a location within Les Illuminations, and I immediately imagine somewhere like Manchester’s Midland Hotel, where a porter nods off to sleep in the middle of the night, lovers unite, a child sees something unexpected in the grounds, and, finally, a whole new world is created by a fire alarm set off during the making of a crème brulée. This dance between the mundane and the fantastical flows seamlessly into the music itself, and we’re all carried away by the lively Camerata playing Les Illuminations itself.

The Camerata, led by Music Director Gabór Takács-Nagy, is a bright and engaging chamber orchestra, the musicians clearly excited and energised during their playing. Gabór himself is an expressive conductor, at one moment standing to attention, then the next almost leaping over to the cellists to bring out deeper notes. When he speaks to the audience, it is about the emotional intensity of the pieces, their personal meaning to him and the power they have to convey the richness of human experience.

The second half of the performance features two of Mozart’s arias, both expressing tenderness and deep love, again sung by Rebecca. She is a perfect compliment to the orchestra, expressive in her approach to both the Mozart and Britten pieces. We’re treated to a wealth of languages through the night, from the English of Michael’s poetry to Rimbaud’s French and Mozart’s Italian and German. The mood flows from the lilting aria into the much angrier and anguished 40th Symphony in G Minor.

Gabór introduces us to the symphony written after Mozart lost his daughter and struggled with debt and personal difficulties. Out of this pain and anger comes a powerful, stomping symphony that carries the audience away completely, along with the musicians themselves. The leader of the orchestra himself bounces out of his seat with his violin while Gabór jumps, strides, leaps and almost dances in front of his lectern. The applause goes on so long, we are offered a reprise of the 3rd Movement, a minuet that storms and kicks and rails at the world, before the night is out.

This is the kind of event that reminds you that even the darkest and most terrible emotions and moments in our lives can be converted to something beautiful. We’ve been through every possible emotion and experience, drawn out through words and music of exceptional quality. Gabór and Michael have an infectious love of what they do and have presented a fascinating and beautiful vision of the human world and everything in it.

Joely Black is an author and writer living in Manchester. She writes for various online and offline magazines and has completed a series of fantasy novels under the title Amnar. She runs a local book club as part of the wider Greater Manchester Skeptics Society and has given talks there and elsewhere on various subjects.

Touched by bombast

2011-10-17T17:13:00.004+01:00

Jonathan Meades, Saturday 15th October, 6.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Nick Garrard.

It’s a cool Manchester evening and Jonathan Meades takes to the stage dressed in a smart black suit, a shirt the colour of bruised salmon and a tie which looks to have been decorated with line upon line of dancing chillies. Fitting stuff, as his appearance tonight is peppered (apols) with so many piquant facts that the margins of my notepad are soon swamped with names and references, saved for dragging up later. The evening is to be neatly split in two: the first half is given over to Meades’ personal reminiscences of Anthony Burgess, while the latter delivers an extended reading from his latest book, a mish-mash of memoir and cultural history.
But first to Burgess.

Meades knew him a little and talks of the man with a mixture of reverence and the fondest of ribbing. Chatting to Burgess, he says, was like spending a few hours with an encyclopaedia. He was a proud autodictat and he knew the word for everything. This, however, wasn’t his only remarkable feature - when first dispatched to meet him, Meades’ commissioning editor’s parting words were, "Be sure to describe his smell." The aroma in question was that of Burma cheroots, a brand of smokes so potent they left deep orange stains on the tips of their bearers’ fingers. Burgess probably wouldn’t have noticed these as he was deeply colour blind. Nor, apparently, did he pay much heed to the eye-bleeding ensembles he often wore in public (dig up his appearance on the Dick Cavett show for a suitably vomitous example).

Burgess was a blessing to the comically inclined. Those who have seen Jonathan Meades’ travelogues will know that he has always excelled at the pithy summary, and he litters his description of Manchester’s most prolific literary son with a gamut of excellent one-liners. Indeed, it seems that every part of his outward appearance served a punchline well, from the curious, asymmetrical sweep of hair ("the combover’s combover") to his mangled accent ("he went for Received Pronunciation but ended up sounding almost exactly like Denis Law"). It is only in describing the work itself that Meades strikes a serious note. He praises Burgess’ broad range of interests and desire to avoid the well-turned paths of the modern literary novel ("endless rounds of north London adultery"). Here, he says, is a world influenced by the roughhouse tradition, as libidinal as a Donald McGill postcard yet as polyglot as Joyce in his highest modernist finery. It’s a loving portrait tenderly drawn, and I leave with a renewed urge to keep reading Burgess. There’s much left to plough through.

Next, it’s a thrill to hear Meades read from his current work in progress. I’ve not come across his print persona before and am pleased to hear it is no less weighted with odd digressions than his television work. He reads for maybe half an hour and, in this time, the range of topics covered is bewildering: he explores the legacy of the Comanche, the work of LSD pioneer Albert Hoffman, and clandestine chemical experiments at the Porten Down facility, all framed within a stirringly evoked episode from his childhood. The writing is sharp and zippy and as we file out into the night, our brains are buzzing with new connections. It’s Saturday night and the world seems alive with possibility.

Nick Garrard lives and works in Manchester. You can follow him on Twitter @havershambler.

God and the devil

2011-10-17T16:55:00.006+01:00

Emma Jane Unsworth & John Niven , Saturday 15th October, 6pm, Event Room, Waterstone’s Deansgate

Words by Catherine Fearn.

There’s a saying in Manchester that on the sixth day God created MANchester. While some may doubt the truth of this statement, what can’t be disputed is that on the sixth day of the Manchester Literature Festival, novelists John Niven and Emma Jane Unsworth held a hilarious reading of their new books, respectively The Second Coming and Hungry, The Stars And Everything.

Both novels are an irreverent take on conventional religion; The Second Coming is awash with blasphemous characters (including God himself) while Hungry, The Stars And Everything features a charismatic yo-yo playing devil.

Niven and Unsworth are both writers of fiction that defy standard classification; on a bookshelf they’d be more at home next to writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathon Swift or John Kennedy Tool. When introducing the novelists to the sold-out audience, Cathy Bolton, Manchester Literature Festival Director, summed up the pair as “two of the wittiest and freshest writers writing in the UK”.

Emma studied English literature at Liverpool University and is an accomplished writer of short fiction and a locally acclaimed journalist; her debut novel Hungry, The Stars And Everything follows Helen Burns, a 29-year-old food critic who is assigned to review a mysterious restaurant called Bethel. The novel, which is set in Manchester, interweaves tales of greed, addiction and alcoholism with "magic realism", hence the devil’s appearances throughout the book. Emma explained where the idea for featuring the devil came from: “I was really interested in fantasies, especially teenage fantasies and sexual awakening. The devil fitted into this as the ultimate rebel and master of temptation.”

Like Emma, John also studied English literature at university and has a background in journalism. The Second Coming showcases Niven as a master of writing sharp, funny dialogue which is embodied in a God that chain-smokes weed and swears like a trooper.

The novel is set around the premise that 57 years on earth equates to one day in heaven; God has taken a seven-day fishing trip around the time of the Renaissance, and on his return finds that things on earth have gone to pot. Originally written as a screenplay, Niven admitted he’d got 50 pages into it when, “I then realised that no Hollywood studio in its right mind would want to film it. I don’t usually have a fixed idea of what a character looks like, but when I was writing the screenplay I imagined God as a youngish Jack Lemmon, Jesus as Owen Wilson, and Danny de Vito as the devil.”

After giving hilarious recitals from chapters of their books, both writers went on to discuss genre and humour in their novels. Emma said: “I write what I love to read. You can get away with a multitude of sins if you’re funny. I’m always listening for funny observations and turns of phrase. You can use humour to change the tone of a novel. Humour’s a great tool as well as fun. I don’t feel I write within a genre. I’ve got the luxury of writing what I want to write. When I was working full time, writing was a hobby. For me, extended prose fiction is freedom - I’m determined to keep it this way.”

Echoing Emma’s sentiments, John also sees genre in fiction as something to be subverted and challenged: “Genre can be fun to play with but it’s more applicable when you’re doing something like a screenplay. Fiction is gloriously free in what you can do. Guys like the Cohen brothers defy conventions, and old conventions of genre are moving on.”

Emma and John met five years ago as the pair share a literary agent. Although the affinities between the two authors were markedly clear during their recital, they differed in some of their views, arguing at one stage over the old adage that "everyone has a book in them". Niven is openly cynical on this point, whereas Emma is a little more considered in her response, replying that “the mechanics of writing a book is hard. We’re novelists, not diarists”, to which Niven added, “Yes, that’s true.”

As the evening drew to a close, one member of the audience asked who their ideal readership is. Niven dismissed the concept of an audience altogether and went on to say that: “My ideal reader is the friend you love to make laugh in a pub.”
For Emma it was herself: “I have no one in mind when I’m writing. I sometimes imagine my worst enemy, someone who would really, really criticise me, so I guess I’m writing to impress my own neurosis.”

Either way, best friend or worst enemy, John Niven and Emma Jane Unsworth (pictured with Emma's publisher Hidden Gem Press' Sherry Ashworth) certainly impressed the audience at Waterstone’s Deansgate. Judging from the laughter and the volume of novels that were signed, it looks as though both of these convention-bending authors will get a sinfully good reception from critics.

Catherine Fearn writes a blog called The Poplar Tree – one of Manchester’s literature-orientated blogs, which includes editorial features on authors, reviews of books, films and anything in between, such as TV programmes and current affairs.

Small is beautiful

2011-10-17T16:44:00.000+01:00

Allan Stratton: Life, Above All, Saturday 15th October, 4pm, Contact

Words by Charlotte Hubback. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

Allan Stratton's talk may have been one of the more intimate, less showy events of the festival; but it was all the more precious for that.

A small crowd of perhaps 30 gathered in a dark theatre space in Contact (a striking building just off Oxford Road that looks like a Space Invaders version of Warwick Castle with a few curves thrown in - it’s a performance space for young people which hosts theatre, art, music, spoken word, dance and DJs), turning their backs on a crisp autumnal afternoon, but fully prepared for another thought-provoking MLF event. I wasn’t the only one who found it even more stimulating than expected.

Allan Stratton is an award-winning Canadian writer for teenagers. His novel Life, Above All, was recently made into a film and nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2011 Oscars (click here for a trailer).

Set against the Botswanan HIV/AIDS pandemic, Life, Above All recounts a 16-year-old girl’s experience of it; the different ways it affects Chandra’s life and her family, and her response to grief.

The event was a combination of readings and Q&A sessions; the first reading demonstrated Stratton’s ability to capture the teenage voice accurately: "All along we put on a calm face in public but come inside to cry… I also hate 'Trust God, he has a reason'… More than anything I want Sarah alive… I don’t even know what I feel."

He spoke of the way cemeteries are opened, then closed so quickly as they all fill up; they surround the city like a "ring of death". This vivid image brought home to me the extent of the epidemic in a way that a thousand statistics could not have done. The dead, including Chandra’s baby sister, just have bricks for gravestones, as no one can afford anything else.

The family dilemmas of a teenage mother who worries whether she or her child will die first, and how she can bear to tell her parents as she is their only child, were movingly delineated by Stratton. The book is now used with schoolchildren in Africa, as a kind of grief therapy: something to make any author proud.

The theme provoked a question about the dichotomy between the writer’s life and the heroine. The unanswerable rejoinder: "None of us have been medieval Danish princes but many actors have played Hamlet." Stratton did go on to reflect on the universality of human experience and the parallels between the New York 1980s gay scene, the US government response, and the contemporary situation in Sub-Saharan Africa. He was vituperative on the church, and particularly the Pope’s response; I was freshly outraged about the Catholic Church’s reluctance to endorse condoms. We reflected on the connections between blood, sex and death, and how that unholy trinity has a particular effect on us.

Despite the universality, it was not a complete surprise to discover the book was actually publisher-led. The audience seemed interested in the writing process and his confession of "worrying commas to death" will have struck a chord with the aspiring writers in the room.

I liked how solicitous Stratton was to us, making a real effort to answer questions loquaciously and fully, perhaps in contrast to more famous writers. His former career as playwright and actor helped to make the readings dramatic, tense and moving in turn: "I vomit at the side of the road. Jonah’s slept with Momma. Momma has AIDS."

We ran out of time (all those interested questioners!), and I was a touch disappointed that Stratton did not read from his new book Borderline, the story of a Muslim-American teenager determinedhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif to save his father from being convicted of terrorism. However, one could not doubt the value of what was covered. George House Trust, a local HIV charity, attended to distribute information, adding a uniquely practical dimension to the afternoon.

At the end, Stratton became philosophical, talking of the fear of failure, taking good health for granted, and how he uses the phrase "this too shall pass" – both in times of struggle, and times of success.

"AIDS is really a metaphor for secrets… All of us have secrets that we think if other people knew they wouldn’t love us so much, or respect us… that shame and stigma… and then the courage it takes to live with loss."

Charlotte Hubback is a freelance editor and a qualified counsellor.

Conflicting evidence

2011-10-17T16:21:00.002+01:00

War Stories: Michelle Green & Zoe Lambert, Saturday 15th October 2011, 1.30pm, Libeskind Room, Imperial War Museum North

Words by David Keyworth.

A sunny Saturday lunchtime in Salford Quays is a world away from Darfur, Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). These war zones are the settings for short stories by Comma Press authors Michelle Green and Zoe Lambert.

As the event gets under way, there are only a handful of empty seats in the Libeskind Room – a kind of seminar venue, away from the Imperial War Museum’s main exhibitions.

Michelle Green, whose short story collection is scheduled to be published in 2012, reads first. Her story may come under the heading of fiction, but its authenticity is testament to the time she spent working for a humanitarian organisation in West Darfur. The Waiting Room is set in a clinic where victims of conflict go to be examined. One of her stories’ major concerns is the tension between the real experience of war and the version we get in official statistics. The shadow of HIV haunts the story but it is an unacknowledged horror – especially because it can be passed on through rape.

Despite the bleak subject matter, the style is not over-dramatic. The author makes her point through the accumulation of detail and the day-to-day struggles of living in a conflict zone.

Zoe Lambert gives us the first sections of two stories from her debut collection The War Tour, just out. In When the Truck Came, young boys in DR Congo are taught to treat the battered guns they are given as objects of reverence. The indoctrination of child soldiers gives the story an ominous sense of foreboding.

The War Tour, the second story from which Zoe reads, lets in a little more humour. A young Manchester couple take a train to Sarajevo and visit "houses cracked with shell-marks" and tunnels where food was smuggled during the siege. James, one half of the couple, grumbles that the tour is a kind of "war Disneyland".

The audience is a good mixture of ages and gender. It contains a strong contingent of what marker researchers call Young Professionals. The post-reading discussion is confidently chaired by Comma Press editor Jim Hinks, who talks of his "immense pride" in giving a platform to Michelle and Zoe.

Topics include research, character development and the use of irony. Michelle says that it took her a long time to get around to writing her stories because the material felt so personal. She talks about the difficulty of re-adapting to British life after being in Darfur. The sound of a helicopter, for example, could bring back unsettling memories.

Zoe talks about the importance of empathy in helping her stories to progress beyond the ironic detachment of a Western author.

Jim rounds off the discussion by asking what British people can do, if anything, to help people in war zones. Michelle argues that we should let those who’ve gained asylum here know that they are welcome – an attitude which is not always apparent in our newspapers.

Visitors to the Imperial War Museum will know that it is not concerned with glorifying conflict but is primarily concerned with "how war shapes lives". This stimulating event made a powerful contribution to this aim.

David Keyworth’s poetry has been published in Smiths Knoll, The SHOp, Rain Dog, this year’s Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat and elsewhere. He is the chair of the Manchester-based group POETICA (email poetica_mcr@yahoo.co.uk). He is currently completing the NCTJ journalism qualification with News Associates.

Prize fighters

2011-10-17T13:35:00.002+01:00

Manchester Fiction Prize Gala, Friday 14th October, 7.30pm, Baronial Hall, Chetham's School Of Music

Words by Sarah-Clare Conlon.

You know you're not going to be disappointed by a gala event when the two hosts are as dapper as Manchester University Press' Matthew Frost and Manchester Metropolitan University's James Draper. Also in their finery and gathered in the auspicious and history-steeped surrounds of the vaulted, pike-adorned Baronial Hall of Chetham's School Of Music are five of the eight writers shortlisted in the biannual Manchester Fiction Prize - "The glistening jewels in the MLF tiara," as Matthew so eruditely describes it.

Three weren't able to make the bash as - global award that it is - two (Nicole Cullen and Judith Turner-Yamamoto) are based in the States and one (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) is in Canada. One other American did fly in: Garret Freymann-Weyr, who is second up from those shortlistees in the room to read from her dynamic dialogue-driven story The Ugly Duckling. She follows Krishan Coupland (pictured), with his strange, emotion-steeped account of a woman "sleeping" in a freezer, Days Necrotic, which scooped two-thirds of the prize money. The other third is ultimately awarded to the third reader present, Richard Hirst, for the sneeze-ridden (the tale, not Richard) School Report. Alex Preston's delivery is very competent; his piece about the war in Afghanistan, The Swimmer In The Desert, laden with great language: "ugly fug of hot, damp air", "froth of sweat". Bethan Rogers' language in The Cuckoo is equally evocative - "he sees that she does not have skin; she has flesh" - and her reading, and narrative style, very engaging.

The stories are presented in the alphabetical order of their authors' surnames, and the missing writers' work is read by the three judges: John Burnside, Alison McLeod and chair of judges Nicholas Royle, who opened proceedings with their own pieces. In summing up, Nick explains what an incredibly difficult and lengthy task the judging process had been - 1,900 entries were received between the launch at Easter and the closing date in August. However, they were able to spot those that would make the longlist. Says Nick: "You know what's going forward. Sometimes it takes no more than a sentence. It's like being hit in the stomach - in a good way, if you can imagine it."

The standard was so high, in fact, that the judges asked if the shortlist could be increased from the original six to eight, and, in another departure from previous years, they asked to split the winnings between two writers. Once the contents of the silver and gold envelopes had been divulged, everyone could breath a sigh of relief - "It's been a tense old week," admitted the girlfriend of one of those who made it onto the winners' rostrum.

All the eight shortlisted stories can be read on the MMU website: click here.

Sarah-Clare Conlon is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. Her award-winning blog, Words & Fixtures, is about language, literature, arts and culture.

Magnificent seven

2011-10-17T11:35:00.004+01:00

Commonword Poetry Factor, 14th October 2011, 7.30pm, Contact Theatre

Words by Catherine Fearn.

The Contact Theatre is arguably one of the most striking buildings in the city and when you step inside this dynamic building it’s easy to see why so many young people are drawn to it. Inside the decor is like a box of Smarties, with walls painted in vibrant purples, oranges and reds and there’s smatterings of stainless steel silver everywhere which give the theatre an edgy, urban feel.

The setting was perfect for an evening of diverse poetry featuring seven young performance poets from across the North West. The Poetry Factor made its debut for Manchester Literature Festival in Space Two, an intimate theatre space that seats around 50 people.

Commonword’s Martin De Mello described the concept behind Poetry Factor as “the idea to give young people coming into spoken word a bit of experience and ongoing mentoring”. The night was hosted by Chanje Kunda, an established performance poet from Manchester, who had a friendly rapport with judges Helen Clare, Baba Israel, Gerry Potter and Segun Lee-French.

Pooja Sitpura was the first performer to shake off nerves with her recitals of Disarm Britain, Wonderbra and Hate. Poojah’s poetry is inspired by personal observations of social injustice and negative portrayals of women and young people in the media. Her poetry was instilled with evocative imagery and delivered with a fiery passion. Similarly Paris Kaur’s first poem of the night entitled Barbie Girl deconstructed the issues surrounding portrayals of women in the cosmetics industry. The poem included snippets of words from cosmetic adverts which contrasted to the lines of narration in which a girl “starves herself thin and makes herself sick”.

Kayleigh Kavanagh and Michael Benet’s performances both depicted love and relationships in all their stark realities. Kayleigh showed a vulnerability that was reflected in the content of her poetry as she explored love using conceits, this came across most poignantly in Barriers. Michael demonstrated an aptitude in his poetry to turn moments of ugly brutality into tender desire; in I Kissed Her Twice, the image of the poet tracing his lover’s palm with his thumb was particularly striking. In contrast, The War was a torrid and intimate poem about a soured relationship which Michael recited with a confident delivery: “I’m scared of her just as much as me / We are too young to know how to clean this mess.”

Aged 14, Isiah Hull was the youngest performer at Poetry Factor and for someone so young had incredible stage presence. Isiah’s recital of Sweet Dreams recalled Ted Hughes’ Thought Fox: “Armed with pen and paper / I journey through imagination.” When asked why he writes poetry he replied: “I often feel surprised at the reaction to my poetry. I write for myself though, as a release. It’s like a therapy.” Jasmine Bourke was also inspired to start writing poetry at a young age after attending a poetry workshop run by Khadija Ibrahim. Jasmine’s poetry addressed social taboos and her first poem It’s Complicated was a remarkable study in mental illness from a variety of perspectives. Her second poem Farewell was penned in tribute to her late grandfather and was performed with solemnity and contained some very moving images.

The final performer of the night was Naima Ali. Her poem I Am Free To Write was addressed to the personified figure of stage fright which she used to address fears over identity and to affirm her own, “If I speak loud enough they might hear.” Naima’s performance reached a dizzying crescendo which contained striking metaphors, “fear is a tumour / I am murder, I killed the crowd.”

With the judges locked in delegations over the winner, Chanje thanked the performance poets saying, “What a wonderful array of voices. I’ve had the most fantastic evening and heard so many wonderful voices. There’s room for all these performers in the world of poetry and theatre.”

After a tense 15-minute wait, the runner-up prize of three mentoring sessions was awarded to Naima Ali. The first prize of £100 plus mentoring sessions was awarded to Michael Benet and on acceptance of his prize Michael said, “I decided today if I did win, it’d go to Help The Heroes.”

During their feedback session, the judges reiterated how impressed they were with the "originality of voices and potent passion" of contestants. Commonword hopes to bring the Poetry Factor back to the festival again next year, and with such a high standard of young performance poets on display at this year’s festival, it looks like a promising start to fulfilling that wish.

Catherine Fearn writes a blog called The Poplar Tree – one of Manchester’s literature-orientated blogs, which includes editorial features on authors, reviews of books, films and anything in between, such as TV programmes and current affairs.

Painting a picture

2011-10-16T10:32:00.004+01:00

Roma Tearne, Friday 14th October, 6pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Words by Ben East.

The notion of the writer as the painter of a scene is a familiar idea in creative writing courses across the world. Roma Tearne, the Sri Lanka-born author of four books, knows this more than most. She actually trained as a painter, studying at the Ruskin School Of Drawing And Fine Art, enjoying a stint as Artist In Residence at the Ashmolean in Oxford, and, notably, exhibiting a short film installation at this year’s Venice Biennale.

“Actually, I’m not a writer in my mind,” she reveals at her talk in the suitably artistic surrounds of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. “I do feel like an artist. I’m petrified of writing sentimental stories.”

All of which might come as a surprise to her ever-growing army of fans. More than anything, Tearne’s books are effortlessly readable rather than knowingly stylised. Her first book, Mosquito, dealt with a haunting love affair against the backdrop of the violent Sri Lankan civil war. It deservedly made the 2007 Costa Book Awards shortlist - which of course are regarded as the more mainstream literary awards. Her latest, The Swimmer, explores love and loss through the voices of a lover, a mother and a daughter - familiar and popular tropes in fiction.

“But it started with a visual image,” she says. “All the books do, because I trained as a painter. And for The Swimmer it was just one photograph - of a beach in Suffolk, where I caught, completely accidentally, an image of a group of people walking. I wondered who these people were, and that was the start.”

In fact, as she began to tease out her story of a young Sri Lankan doctor, Ben, who works illegally on a Suffolk farm as he seeks asylum (and whom the fortysomething Ria finds swimming in the river at the bottom of her garden, sparking a passionate affair), it was another picture which gave the tale a focus.

“I saw the photograph of the mother of Jean Charles De Menezes,” she says. “It was so moving - in the image she’s only just heard that her son has been shot in Stockwell by the Metropolitan police. There’s this expression of total shock and bewilderment, and I found myself wanting to know how she would cope in the weeks and months after. How she would eat, even. And I tried working it out in The Swimmer. I even listened to Wagner and Strauss to try and understand the rhythm of grief and lament.”

The Swimmer is a departure for Tearne, she explains, as the first three books are much more autobiographical. Her concerns about the country of her birth - which she left in the 1960s and believes she couldn’t return to for fear of her own safety - are still prevalent though, both in the character of Ben and in the closing phases of this fascinating talk. She speaks passionately about the traumatised Tamils of Sri Lanka, of a country which needs a change of leadership to effect real change.

And perhaps these political, humanitarian pictures she paints to the audience, an audience who could easily believe that all is now well in Sri Lanka, are the most important of all.

Ben East is an arts and culture journalist based in Manchester. You can follow him on Twitter @beneast74

The "other" women

2011-10-15T15:51:00.008+01:00

Marilyn Heward Mills: The Association Of Foreign Spouses, Friday 14th October, 1pm, Becker Room, Manchester City Library

Words by Richard Jackson.

On the fifth calendar-day of the Manchester Literature Festival 2011, the city has once again proved itself worthy of showcasing the finest international talents of contemporary literati in playing host to the delightfully charming Swiss-Ghanian-Anglo author Marilyn Heward Mills, who was born in Basel, but raised in Ghana.

Being the first event of this year’s festival to be held in the Manchester City Library, everyone is appropriately welcomed by Libby Tempest of the library service, who echoes the sentiment of the eager audience – most of whom are freshly seated from looting an impressive lunch from Weightmans legal firm, laid out grandiosely for those who came – through saying, “What better way could we have to start than Marilyn Heward Mills?”

Even before the author begins to speak, one can sense a tangible feeling of affection towards Heward Mills. Towards the end of the event, it transpires that a number of the predominantly female audience present in the library’s Becker Room have shared many of the experiences discussed by Mills in her latest novel, and subject of her talk today, The Association Of Foreign Spouses.

Welcomed under a blanket of warm clapping (with directed enthusiasm coming from the aforementioned real "foreign spouses" that are present), Marilyn Heward Mills opens the hour of literary fare with two short readings from her novel. Representative of the issues raised in the book, and the calmly erudite discussion that will follow, the room is introduced to Eva. Suggested by Heward Mills to be the main character in the novel, the passage concerns Eva recalling how she first came to be in Ghana. Through this, we hear a fictionalised snippet from the life of a foreign, non-African lady living in Ghana, having moved to the country for the love of her husband.

Ending the reading, the author clarifies her choice of passage by offering a brief biographical portrait, in which she touches upon her reasons for wanting to become a novelist: “When I came to writing my first book, it was after many years of thinking I would like to write a story, when I was growing up in Ghana. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and it was a very turbulent time. There was very little by way of entertainment so a lot of my entertainment was really reading, and in the long gaps and the long holidays, there was a lot of time and opportunity for your imagination to run wild. When I look back now, I realise a lot of my time was spent in a fantasy world. When I came to writing a book, I realised that I was actually interested in writing about Ghana, and exploring the culture. And I think a lot of that is because my parents had raised me in a culturally neutral home.”

Her mother being Swiss, her father a Ghanian, what then follows is a discussion - led by Heward Mills - that analyses the intentions behind her meta-fictional work. She mentions how exploring and understanding conflicting cultures is her chief fascination. Poignantly, anecdotes from her own upbringing are offered; clashes between African and European customs at her father’s funeral are discussed with a smile and humour, building to further yarns concerning amusing differences that arise from engagements and cross-cultural marriages in Ghana, the jocular deficiencies of male Ghanaians, as well as fraught circumstances that arise from hosting and visiting foreign relatives.

Reading this, it will come as no surprise to guess that the central theme of this afternoon’s discussion is the dichotomy that arises when two mutually exclusive cultures collide. It is a conversation that the audience embraces with fervour. The final half hour is filled with enthusiastic questions, some of those present even recounting and sharing their own experiences, highlighting the pluralism offered from The Association Of Foreign Spouses, in that so many diverse experiences are mirrored in the novel.

In the end however, it is clear that at heart of the afternoon, and indeed Marilyn Heward Mills’ fiction, is the admiration she feels for her own mother. It is her mother’s journey - leaving Europe to face the unknown, in Ghana - that has encouraged Heward Mills to raise the important questions that form her work: how can one survive as "the other"; what encourages people to say in an "alien" land, and how people adapt to survive.

While many hands are still raised, the majority of people still pondering all they have learned about Ghana, one of the final questions, conveniently directing the pleasant and insightful discussion to its final close, is asked: “Where is home now?” To which Heward Mills responds: “Home is London, south east London. I think England is - I feel very at home here now.” For the audience, and those of us who enjoy reading fascinating insights into other countries, we are all thankful for this.

Richard Jackson is a PhD student interested in Central and Eastern European history, literature and culture. His blog, Lemberik, concerns the issues of minority populations in this region and he can be followed on Twitter via @lemberik.

A Tale of Two Dickens

2011-10-14T17:00:00.000+01:00

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life, Thursday 13th October, 7.30pm, Banqueting Room, Manchester Town Hall

Review 1: Words by Ben East. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

Is there a more apt setting for Claire Tomalin’s talk on the subject of her incredible new biography, Charles Dickens, than the Victorian, neo-gothic magnificence of Manchester Town Hall?

Dickens, of course, is often seen as a peculiarly London writer, charting the travails of the capital’s poor and downtrodden. But this is the man whose Hard Times - memorably adapted by Library Theatre Company in an Ancoats mill earlier this year - was based on his travels to the choking towns of the industrial north. Dickens also shared Manchester writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s interest in helping the vulnerable - “the raising up of those who were down” - and would perhaps have liked to share rather more with her if Tomalin’s reading of his flirtatious letters is to be believed. And, predating Bob Dylan by over a century, Dickens’ public appearances were so popular he sold out a brand-spanking new Free Trade Hall more than once.

“It’s really sad to think he never had the pleasure of seeing this building,” says Tomalin - Dickens died in 1870 and the Town Hall was completed in 1877. It’s not the only sadness Tomalin has for Dickens: she remains appalled by the way he treated his wife and, subsequently, how his life descended into a web of lies to protect his reputation. “He ended up living one of his novels,” she smiles.

That’s the beauty of this evening - and all of Tomalin’s books. Though she admits that the art of biography is to try to get close to someone - the by-product being that she “ends up loving them” - Tomalin isn’t afraid to point out Dickens' failings. She thinks that the way he wrote - in serial form for newspapers and magazines - affected the quality of the work. He didn’t write female characters particularly well, and she considers the first third of A Tale Of Two Cities to be essentially unreadable.

It’s incredibly refreshing to hear; so often the classic writers are lionised to the point where they are impeachable: walking away from Hard Times in Ancoats , it seemed almost sacrilegious to suggest that perhaps the story was just a little sentimental and ham-fistedly moralistic.

Which is not, of course, to suggest that Tomalin is here to give Dickens a kicking. “There’s a lot that’s not very good in the books, but they remain great,” she says, suggesting he’s perhaps the greatest creator of character since Shakespeare. Just a roll call of his famous creations - Mr Pickwick, Miss Havisham, the Artful Dodger, Oliver Twist and so on - is testament to that.

But perhaps his greatest creation was himself. When Tomalin describes a dandy who liked dressing well, holding wild parties and celebrations, turning down dinner with the President Of The United States in the White House just because he could, it’s a world away from his tough upbringing working in a London blacking factory and his manic work ethic. He had amassed a fortune and legions of fans, but never forgot his interest in, and the importance of, society’s rejects.

“It was like trying to write five biographies at once,” jokes Tomalin. The thing is, she makes such a tough balancing act look easy.

Ben East is an arts and culture journalist based in Manchester. You can follow him on Twitter @beneast74

Review 2: Words by Peter Wild. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

We find ourselves ensconced in the Banqueting Room of Manchester Town Hall, "a lovely room" our host for the evening Claire Tomalin tells us, in a building that Charles Dickens, the subject of her latest magnificent biography, would unfortunately not have been alive to see the construction of. Claire tells us she is glad to be in Manchester as Manchester was a city that Dickens visited many times. In the pages of Charles Dickens – A Life, we learn that Manchester played a fateful role in the latter stages of his life for it was here (in the Free Trade Hall) that he performed in Wilkie Collins’ play, The Frozen Deep, appearing on a stage alongside Nelly Ternan and her sisters; Nelly Ternan, of course, Dickens' mistress in the last years of his life and the subject of Tomalin’s other masterful Dickens’ biography, The Invisible Woman.

The Banqueting Room is filled to the rafters with an adoring crowd who sit, seemingly on the edge of their seats, listening to Claire quietly anecdotalise, drawing on stories from her research and her subject’s life as if she was the most entertaining dinner guest Downton Abbey had ever seen. As she begins, the city in the shape of a beer festival and a karaoke clown belting out the hits of Al Green looks like it will be a distraction, but it isn’t long before Claire’s authoritative erudition charms us and blocks our ears to anything else. She takes us through Dickens’ life, from his early years (a relation flees the country dogged by scandal, the young Dickens couldn’t help but be made aware of the darkness of family secrets), not really touching on his strange neglect at the hands of his parents but mentioning his humiliating time in the blacking factory as an aside, before touching on everything from his habit – albeit a habit of necessity – of writing novels side by side (The Pickwick Papers was written at the same time as Oliver Twist; when Pickwick was done he launched into Nicholas Nickleby) to his love of France (Dickens wrote parts of Little Dorrit, Dombey And Son and A Tale Of Two Cities in Paris, learned the language well enough to write it and watch French plays in the theatre, and befriended many of the great French writers of the day).

We learn of Dickens’ habit of playing publishers off one against the other, his fame being such ("He was like a rocket," Claire tells us, "but a rocket that never stopped") that his ability to sell books rapidly outgrossed whatever deal he had in place with his publishers such that, in the early years at least, he made more money for them than he made for himself; how it was Dombey And Son that gave him the financial stability he’d searched for all of his life; and, perhaps perversely, how that financial stability seemed to give birth to a new restlessness that saw him splitting from wife and fashioning defences for himself because it was important he was always right (this need, in light of the split, saw him behaving "wickedly", Claire quotes his daughter as saying, and it’s hard to disagree). There is also time for a rapid assessment of some of the novels – "I do think it’s the job of a biographer, particularly the biographer of novelists, to try and assess the works too," Claire explains – and we learn that the first 14 chapters of David Copperfield are regarded by Claire as among the very best literature we have ever produced, although Great Expectations is her particular favourite.

The evening ends with questions. Your humble reviewer asks Claire about her own feelings regarding Dickens – and she tells us she has grown fonder of him as she worked on the book, seemingly in opposition to Peter Ackroyd, whose own biography of Dickens seems to chart a falling-out with his subject. A gentleman on the front row wonders whether the necessity to deliver monthly instalments of novels creates problems, making the novels longer and baggier than they should be and this leads to a brief discussion of Barnaby Rudge – although even here Claire has good things to say (Barnaby Rudge has a handicapped hero which, taken alongside Our Mutual Friend’s Jenny Wren, puts Dickens in a singularly unique place as a writer). "We know that David Copperfield was Dickens’ own favourite child," a member of the audience asks, "but what is your own favourite child?" Claire was asked. "Mary Wollstonecraft is my oldest child," she tells us before going on to explain that she felt she’d learned how to do what it is she does in that book and so holds it in high regard, before going on to talk about Mrs Jordan and Pepys – "I’d better stop there," she said smiling, "otherwise I’ll just list all of my books."

Heading out of Manchester Town Hall into the chill evening, I find myself surrounded by couples clucking to themselves about what a pleasant evening they’d had. "I could listen to her talk about Dickens all evening," a lady I passed on the stairs said to her elderly husband. I couldn’t help but nod and agree.

Peter Wild is an author and the editor of Bookmunch.

Fact or friction?

2011-10-14T14:27:00.007+01:00

Michael Frayn: My Father's Fortune, Thursday 13th October, 5pm, Banqueting Room, Manchester Town Hall

Words by Benjamin Judge. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

The banqueting room in Manchester Town Hall is quite the impressive venue. The grill in the fireplace has been formed into the figures of a lion and a dragon. The walls are wood-panelled to head height and above the panelling are swathes of heraldic patterning and paintings of former aldermen. Three giant chandeliers hang from the distant ceiling which is a lattice of wooden squares with sixteen-pointed suns staring blankly from their corners. The sun motif is repeated at the centre of the handles on the huge windows, decorated with stained glass at their peak and edges, which spread along one wall of the room. Through the windows we can see Albert Square, and beyond it the skyline of Manchester.

Someone brings a cup of tea and a milk jug to the stage on a silver tray. This is, like, well posh.

Manchester Literature Festival has a knack of finding great venues like this, of celebrating the city as well as literature, but we are in such a large space for a reason; it is needed to house the sizeable crowd that is gathering. The audience is made up of people of all ages, which reflects not only Frayn’s longevity but his ability to engage with new readers throughout his fifty-year career. Some are fans of Michael Frayn the playwright, some Michael Frayn the novelist, some even Michael Frayn the journalist, but tonight we are presented with Michael Frayn the biographer.

Frayn’s latest book, My Father’s Fortune, is a biography of his father; a salesman who overcame his difficult upbringing and a tragedy and the onset of disability in the middle of his life. Frayn was asked to write the book by his children, who felt that they had “arisen from an unknown place”, and was written from a combination of his own memory and what scant information he could gather from official records.

The move toward biography is not an unexpected one. Frayn’s most recent plays have been fictional portrayals of actual events. At one point this evening he claims his recent career has been moving toward fact, noting that as you get older you find more need to record events and a fading ability to invent. He then immediately, mischievously, undercuts this assertion by announcing his next book will be a novel with absolutely no grounding in the real world.

This playful tone is typical of the evening. Frayn is a lively and engaging speaker who gives us a speech that is filled with both anecdote and postulation. Instead of just giving us a brief outline of his book, he asks us to think about what the book is actually a record of. What is true in the writer’s memory? Why is memory fallible? Is one account of factual events really any closer to truth than fiction? He shows us how our eyes’ ability to only see a very small area in detail, and the periphery unclearly, results in having to move them rapidly to build the composite picture we actually see: and that this means that even our image of the present is in fact constructed of memories. My Father’s Fortune is, as far as Frayn can see, only as close to truth as anything ever can be, which is to say, not true at all.

This uncertainty leads Frayn to conclude by asking himself “Should I have done it?” The book offers him no sense of catharsis or "closure". Instead “it stirred everything up, and everything stayed stirred up.” He is sure his father would hate the book, and disagree with its version of events. I am pretty confident the rest of us will love it, especially if tonight’s intelligent talk is an indication of what to expect.

Benjamin Judge's blog, Who The Fudge Is Benjamin Judge?, has been shortlisted for Best Writing On A Blog at the Manchester Blog Awards.

Taking a thought for a walk...

2011-10-13T14:09:00.010+01:00

Manchester Sermon with Andrew Motion, Tuesday 11th October, 7pm, Manchester Cathedral

Words by Eleanor Crawforth. Photograph by Jon Atkin.

In his introduction to one of the major opening events of this year’s Manchester Literature Festival, Canon Andrew Shanks made an unusual request: following the author’s performance, there was to be “no applause... just a moment of meditative reflection”. For this was no ordinary literary reading or lecture, but a sermon, with all the reverential customs and cultural associations of that particular kind of oration. Sir Andrew Motion (pictured, left) was tasked with delivering MLF’s now annual Manchester Sermon, an event conceived with the aim of reaffirming the “rich, imaginative potential” (Shanks) of the sermon and reviving for contemporary secular society this neglected literary form once so central to British culture. His challenge was an unenviable one: to follow Jeanette Winterson’s electrifying inaugural sermon at last year’s festival.

If Motion felt daunted by his weighty brief or by the magnificent surroundings of Manchester Cathedral on Tuesday evening, he did not show it. The decade of laureateship which equipped him to perform at the twenty-first birthday parties of young royals (an experience which he might rather forget) has produced a consummate and professional performer, unfazed by the expectations of the 200-strong “congregation” before him. Following a beautiful performance by the Manchester Cathedral Choir, Motion took to the pulpit to begin what he modestly described as a “determined doodle” or, referencing the artist Paul Klee, “taking a thought for a walk”. If there was a sense of wandering in this sermon, it was of a distinctly affable sort, dignified by Motion’s rich, mellifluous baritone and humble, even apologetic air. The word “sermon” may derive from the Latin word sermō, meaning “discourse”, but it is also linked with the word serere, or “to join together”. While Motion’s sermon may have meandered amiably in its discourse, it certainly “joined together” – poetry and faith, public and private, preacher and congregation.

Opening with the Book of Ruth, Motion quoted Ruth’s words to Naomi upon following her back to Israel from the land of Moab: “Entreat me not to leave thee; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.” Motion then expanded these Biblical beginnings to encompass artistic creation. He identified in them an enduring need for human connection which has affinities with the eternal dilemma of the emigrant, as well as that of the artist: the requirement of total self-immersion in something, or someone, other. Like Ruth and like the emigrant, the author must to some extent subsume his or her own identity in order to be absorbed into another, imaginative world. The “effort to escape one’s ego” is vital to the success of a poem; yet for Motion, this act of self-sacrifice is as much one of self-preservation as of self-denial. Here Motion adopted Keats’ famous declaration that poets are “chameleons”, altering their own shape to allow their poem its own independent existence. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” wrote Keats in 1818. “Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.”

From this point onwards, Motion’s sermon became a rumination on the poetic impulse which, despite being frequently clothed in the language of academia, he described as a “basic, primitive” human urge. Liberated from the shackles of his laureateship, Motion made an impassioned attack on Tory policy in relation to literacy and culture, criticising recent library closures and savage cuts to the arts budget. The educational curriculum also came under fire: “Why do so many of our school children leave school thinking that poetry is not for them?” He attributed this resistance partly to our exam-focused teaching system and partly to people’s distrustful need to “define” or “explain away” a poem. Instead, Motion advocated the necessity of playfulness, ambiguity and anti-utilitarianism in language. And here he found his religious analogy: poetry, like faith, is not an exact science; it requires the reader (or the believer) to accept simultaneously the known and the unknown. This extends to poetic composition: in Motion’s own writing, the creative impulse is transient; it comes and goes like his religious faith. As with prayer, the writer must “keep his mind open, his muscles ready” for that moment when everything aligns to allow, for want of a better word, communion.

And with that, preacher Motion stepped down from his pulpit to take part in a lively post-sermon discussion chaired by the excellent Reverend Richard Coles (pictured, right). Coles was an appropriate choice of host: for many listeners to Saturday Live, the programme he presents, he personifies that other Voice of God: Radio 4.

Eleanor Crawforth works for the Manchester-based publisher Carcanet Press, where she is Sales & Marketing Manager and Assistant Editor. She co-edited the Carcanet anthologies New Poetries IV (2007) and New Poetries V (2011) and writes for the literary magazine PN Review. Follow the Carcanet blog here.

Carcanet published Andrew Motion’s first poetry collection, The Pleasure Steamers, in 1978. Carcanet also publish the sermons of John Henry Newman, Hugh Latimer and others, and the Select Meditations of Thomas Traherne.

You can now download a copy of the Manchester Sermon 2011 on the Manchester Literature Festival website: click here.

Everything really was All Write!

2011-10-13T10:42:00.014+01:00

All Write! Celebration, Wednesday 12th October, 1-3pm, Geoffrey Manton Building, MMU

Words by Kevin Danson.

Despite the drizzly Manchester weather, the foyer of Lecture Room 1 is filled with excited chatter fluttering above the heads of primary and secondary school children; winners of this year’s All Write! creative writing competition. Teaming up with Manchester Literature Festival, All Write! has produced two inspiring anthologies from young writers across the UK and beyond.

Hosting this year’s event is Kaye Tew, organiser of the annual All Write! competition and Co-Director of Manchester Children’s Book Festival, and James Draper, Co-Director of MCBF and Project Manager of MMU’s Writing School.

With over 600 writers entering their work, the panel of judges have laughed, cried and fiercely argued about which pieces should make their way into the final collection. Fortunately however, this year has been special, giving a chance to younger writers by dividing the competition into two categories; Juniors (9-12 year olds) and Seniors (12-15 year olds). That’s TWO anthologies with around 130 pieces spread between them. Excellent!

After James warms up the crowd with his Brucie "Nice to see you, to see you?" catchphrase, the celebration begins. Presenting the winners of the Senior category with a published copy of their work in the All Write! anthology is poet and scriptwriter Anjum Malik. Anjum especially commends Maisie Twigger for her poem Lines (first page of Senior anthology), Declan Doyle for his short story The Assassination, Shannon Casey with her sonnet about teachers, My Sonnet, and Shakai Headley’s sonnet on computer games, Sonnet. Connie Bowles (pictured with Anjum) was commended for her witty poem Lady Gaga, and was overall winner in the Senior category.

Winners in the Senior category:
Connie Bowles – Lady Gaga
Declan Doyle – The Assassination
Jainee Khushali Patel – The God Of Rock

In a contest to see which school can be the most supportive with applause and cheers, the overall winners of the Senior category make their way to pick up a collection of signed books from authors of last year’s Manchester Children’s Book Festival.

James then re-takes the microphone and tells us that the stories sent in for the Junior category had something missing... when the judges began reading the stories, images immediately began to appear, but these were only in their heads. Since this anthology is to be read by a new audience - children from primary school - the organisers decided it deserved to be illustrated, like the very best of children’s books. Rising from the front row, the official illustrator of Manchester Children’s Book Festival Dai Owen thanks the writers of these stories and poems for giving him such easy material to work with, as well as for the fun he had creating images like Jack and Jill as hoodies (Jack and Jill 2.0 by Tiernan Laird, Erin McShane, Ben McLaughlin, Eoin Dignam and Louisa Byrne) and the haunting bloody fingers from under the bed (Bloody Fingers by Drew Ellis-Wetherill).

James commends the Junior writers Farrah Nicholson, for her story Should Ronald McDonald Retire?, and Erin Wass, for her excellent perceptive poem of items in her teacher’s pocket, In Mrs Burgess’ Pocket. Overall winners in the Junior category were Anoushka Hayward-New of Alma Park Primary with her story Loved And Lost and Sally Ainsworth, from Longdendale Community Language College, with her piece Meet Me In Coffin Meadow - an author from Manchester Children’s Book Festival will visit Sally and Anoushka's schools.

The range of talent within this room is astounding. To think that many of these young writers could be on the path to creating fine stories and literature is not far from reality. Congratulations to each and every one who sent their stories in to be looked at and to those who made the final collection within the two anthologies.

And if you're a creative young writer who feels inspired, here are some new projects for under 18s in 2012:
The Midland Future Manchester Young Writers Competition 2012, in partnership with Manchester Literature Festival, Manchester Children’s Book Festival and Manchester Science Festival.
Manchester Children’s Book Festival 2012 will include writers such as Philip Pullman, Michael Rosen, Jacqueline Wilson, Cathy Cassidy and many more.
Portico Young Writers' Prize
And of course, the All Write! Competition 2012.

Kevin Danson is an English Literature student at MMU. Read his blog Pebbleddash and follow him on Twitter @pebbleddash.

Plaques and plaudits

2011-10-12T18:35:00.000+01:00

Discover Literary Manchester tour, Wednesday 12th October, 2pm

Words by Sarah-Clare Conlon.

One of the first things Blue Badge Guide and Manchester Confidential Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Schofield tells us as we gather in St Ann's Square is that he won't allow his writers to mention the rain in their reviews. That's going to be a little tricky here, as we spend much of our one-hour literary tour of the city centre being spritzed on. Still, it doesn't seem to dampen anyone's spirits as we wander around looking at plaques and gravestones and signs and buildings, and we even draw curious glances from passers-by as we laugh at the anecdotes and quotations Jonathan shares with the 30-strong group - so much so that some people even tag along.

Under the canopy of the Royal Exchange, we hear about the disparate characters of Karl Marx (dour) and Friedrich Engels (cheery), who read together at Chetham's Library back in the 1840s. At the other end of the square, we learn of the beginnings of the Manchester Guardian in front of Thomas de Quincey's final resting place. Round the corner, up King Street, William Harrison Ainsworth's Regency house may have been replaced by a garish modern monolith, but the saucy extracts we're treated to here still stand the test of time.

Next, we meander over to the Town Hall, which has in recent years hosted the likes of Carol Ann Duffy, Emma Jane Unsworth and Joe Stretch, and which was described in the 19th century by writer and art patron (he was a particular fan of Ford Madox Brown, whose murals live within the Albert Square structure and whose work features in a special Manchester Art Gallery show until 29 January) as "the most truly magnificent Gothic apartment in Europe". Over the way, Jonathan reads from Anthony Burgess' "autobiography" Little Wilson And Big God, describing "a bookish flat in Ardwick" where the author alleges to have been deflowered by a woman who studied Marx and Engels ("Whoever they are" - Burgess) and who the writer apparently met on the steps of Central Library.

We are referred to Manchester settings in Burgess' Any Old Iron and Howard Jacobsen's The Mighty Waltzer, then pop down the road to opposite the old Free Trade Hall, now the Radisson, where Charles Dickens spoke annually for 20 years back in the day. Jonathan recites some poetry by the rather more contemporary John Cooper Clarke, then we're off to the John Rylands Library on Deansgate to round things off with a bit of Elizabeth Gaskell. I learnt lots about literature in the Rainy City, and I promise not to mention the weather again.

Jonathan will be running variations of the tour, specially commissioned by HSBC Premier, throughout Manchester Literature Festival (Friday 14 October, 2-3pm; Saturday 15 October, 4-5pm; Sunday 16 October, 4-5pm; Wednesday 19 October, 4-5pm; Friday 21 October, 2-3pm; Saturday 22 October, 2-3pm) - places are free but you need to book via Jonathan Schofield Tours.

Sarah-Clare Conlon is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. Her award-winning blog, Words & Fixtures, is about language, literature, arts and culture.

The changing faces of gay lit

2011-10-11T12:35:00.001+01:00

Colm Tóibín in conversation with Alan Hollinghurst, Monday 10th October, 6.30pm, Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama

Words by Ben East. Photograph by Ed Swinden.

“I can’t remember when I even first heard of the sodding Booker.” Alan Hollinghurst (pictured, right) rolls his eyes and the most prestigious literary prize, awarded next week, is not spoken of again at this opening Manchester Literature Festival event.

Is Hollinghurst bitter not to have made the shortlist for his new book The Stranger’s Child? Should fellow panellist Colm Tóibín (pictured, left) have won for his brilliant Brooklyn two years ago? We’ll never know, but then, Hollinghurst and Tóibín have far more important matters to discuss; namely their thoughts on gay fiction and what it is to be a homosexual and a writer.

This is Tóibín’s first engagement as Professor Of Creative Writing at The University Of Manchester, and there’s no doubt he’ll be a huge hit, both with students and the wider public. Speaking without notes, the novelist, critic, short story writer and essayist is a natural raconteur, painting an evocative picture of Dublin in 1980. A place where homosexuality was something that was quietly navigated by the gay and straight community; where people were left to fill in the “gaps” of someone’s sexuality if they wanted to. “There were levels and layers,” as Tóibín puts it.

Tóibín was 25 then, and hadn’t written a word of fiction. But, he says, it was a chance encounter with a young Argentinian man living in a repressed Buenos Aires which changed everything. This man’s only image of who he was as a homosexual was a character in a new-ish novel. It made Tóibín think that he too might be able to find a fictional voice for people like this Argentine. And that book was Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library.

Hollinghurst is slightly bashful at the thought that he has been that influential - he’s a much quieter, more reserved character. But he agrees with Tóibín that for a long period of time, the book really mattered for homosexuals, that seeing gay relationships written down was really important. He wonders whether that thrill, that giddy sense of daring about writing from what he calls “the gay position” is no longer notable.

Which is a good thing in some ways. Some authors didn’t dare at all: Hollinghurst refers us to EM Forster, who gave up being a practising novelist after the publication of A Passage To India in 1924, because he was “stumped by the impossibility of writing about the thing that mattered most to him”.

These days, Forster would be free to write what he wanted - in most societies. As Tóibín semi-jokes, there are now so many straight authors writing convincing gay characters, the likes of himself and Hollinghurst will end up having to write about straight people. Which is, of course, exactly what he did in the Costa-winning Brooklyn.

“Brooklyn is about who you are and what you amount to,” he says. “And that can come from many sources. It can be your sexuality. But it can also be your memory. You have to see where the writing takes you.”

And the joy of Tóibín and Hollinghurst’s writing is that it takes you in many, many directions.

Ben East is an arts and culture journalist based in Manchester. You can follow him on Twitter @beneast74

Entry details now online for the Midland Future Manchester Competition for Young Writers

2011-10-10T16:15:00.000+01:00

Details of how to enter the Midland Future Manchester Competition for Young Writers, which Julie Bertagna launches on Saturday 15 October and which MLF coordinates in partnership with Manchester Children’s Book Festival and Manchester Science Festival, are now online. Entries are invited from young writers aged 12-16 and we're looking for fictional short stories imagining what life in Manchester will be like at least 10 years in the future and how it may be affected by technological and environmental changes.

The competition will be judged by representatives of the Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester Children’s Book Festival, and the overall winner will be selected by Julie, who will be providing top tips on how to write science-inspired fiction and how to get started with your story at a special launch at the Midland Hotel on Saturday 15 October (tickets are free, but booking is advised. Full details here). At the event, Julie will also be talking about her acclaimed trilogy for young adults, Exodus, Zenith and Aurora, which tells the incredible story of young people fighting to survive in a world that is drowning in the melt from polar icecaps.

The Midland Future Manchester Competition Rules
• The deadline for entries is 5pm on 5 March 2012. Entries received after the deadline will not be considered.
• Entrants must be aged between 12 and 16 on 31 August 2012 to enter the competition.
• Entries must be the writer's own work.
• Entrants must live in Greater Manchester.
• Stories should be between 500 and 1,000 words in length and typed on A4 paper and posted to the address published on our website or sent as an email attachment (Word document please) to admin@manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk with "Future Manchester" in the subject heading.

Winning entrants will have their stories published in an anthology which will be presented by author Julie Bertagna at a Manchester Children's Book Festival event on Friday 6 July 2012 at the Museum of Science and Industry. The overall winner will receive a pocket video camera.

Manchester Fiction Prize shortlist announced

2011-10-09T11:40:00.004+01:00

MLF and the Manchester Writing School at MMU are pleased to announce the shortlist for the international Manchester Fiction Prize for best new short story. The winner, who receives £10,000, will be announced at a special gala event at Chetham's on Friday: for more details, click here. The evening will feature readings from seven of the eight shortlisted entrants along with stories by the judges – John Burnside, Alison MacLeod and Nicholas Royle.

A record 1,863 entries were received from around the globe, and the judges spent three months whittling them down to 40 commended stories, and then the final eight. Judging involved intensive and meticulous reading, re-reading and discussion, but the judges were thrilled with the overall standard.

So, in alphabetical order by surname, the Manchester Fiction Prize 2011 shortlist:

Krishan Coupland, from Southampton, UK, with Days Necrotic

Nicole Cullen, from Wisconsin, USA, with Flathead Lake

Garret Freymann-Weyr, from North Carolina, USA, with The Ugly Duckling

Richard Hirst, from Preston, UK, with School Report

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, from Vancouver, Canada, with The Doppelgangers

Alex Preston, from London, UK, with The Swimmer in the Desert

Bethany Rogers, from Gateshead, UK, with The Cuckoo

Judith Turner-Yamamoto, from Ohio, USA, with A Mercy

Theme #6: Anthony Burgess

2011-10-07T15:01:00.005+01:00

Will Carr - Deputy Director of the Festival’s official Hub, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation - continues our series in which we look at some of the themes at Manchester Literature Festival 2011.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation is delighted to be the Festival Hub for the 2011 Manchester Literature Festival. Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. He is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, but altogether he wrote 33 novels, 25 works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies, more than 200 other musical works, reams of journalism and much more. He was born in Manchester, grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side, went to school in Rusholme, and studied at Manchester University: he is one of the greatest literary exports of the city and is still widely read all over the world.

We’ve arranged three events in partnership with the Festival this year, all of which have a Burgess connection. On 15 October at 11am the guide Ed Glinert will lead an Anthony Burgess Tour of Manchester, which will take in the sites most important to Burgess and give an insight into the context that shaped his writing and music. This will conclude at 2pm at the Burgess Foundation, where Dr Andrew Biswell – who wrote the biography The Real Life Of Anthony Burgess – will give a talk on Burgess and the city of his birth.

At 6.30pm on 15 October, the influential novelist, architecture critic, food writer, modernist and commentator Jonathan Meades will give a talk. Meades will speak about his exchanges with Burgess, whom he interviewed and corresponded with, and also introduce his forthcoming memoir, An Encyclopedia Of Myself.

On 22 October (6pm), there will be a Celebration of BS Johnson, the great lost experimental novelist and film-maker of the 1960s. Burgess and Johnson knew each other and exchanged letters and manuscripts: we have recently discovered in our archives a corrected proof of Johnson’s text Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, which is a unique piece of the jigsaw of Johnson’s life. Journalist and comedy writer David Quantick, a champion of Johnson’s work, will introduce two short films, You’re Human Like The Rest Of Them and The Unfortunates; and there will be readings and discussion of Johnson’s extraordinary prose.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation is hosting events every night and we hope to welcome everyone in town for the Festival to our venue on Cambridge Street, just off Oxford Road. The Burgess Foundation café will be open from 9am every day of the Festival, until the final event finishes, and if you’d like to look round our library and find out more about what we do please email Paula Price on info@anthonyburgess.org to make an appointment. More details about the Foundation and its work are online at www.anthonyburgess.org.

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk

Writes & Reads #6: Michelle Green

2011-10-06T10:27:00.001+01:00

Every week, we chat to a writer appearing at the Festival and ask them to share their book and event choices.

Michelle will be reading from her forthcoming collection of short stories at the War Stories event at the Imperial War Museum on Saturday 15th October (1.30pm, Imperial War Museum North, tickets are free but booking is advised), alongside Zoe Lambert. Her upcoming book explores the ongoing conflict in West Darfur and will be out with Comma Press in 2012. Her poetry collection Knee High Affairs is available from Crocus Books, and audio cuts can be found on her website.

MLF: List your top three favourite books…
MG: My top three favorite books are Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips, and Manda Scott’s Boudica series (yep, there are four in the series, but I can only read them as one).

MLF: What are you reading right now?
MG: Right now I’m re-reading Darfur: A Short History Of A Long War by Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, and, for the first time and for balance, Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods.

MLF: How did you get to this point in your writing career?
MG: I’ve followed my curiosity to where I am now. I’ve also learned to listen and rewrite.

MLF: Who would you cite as your biggest influence, be they another writer, an artist, a musician, a Premier League footballer…
MG: My biggest and most consistent influence is Bjork - for her sharp skill and innovation. Robert Fisk comes a close second: an incredible writer, a precise and poetic journalist and thinker.

MLF: Which events in this year’s MLF programme are must-sees for you?
MG: I am very excited about the Alan Turing and Morphogenesis event at MadLab on October 23rd. There can never be too much Alan Turing content, in my opinion. I’m also looking forward to the formidable poet Jean Binta Breeze on 22nd October and local gem Gerry Potter who presents his new book The Men Pomes on October 21st.

MLF: Tell us about what you’re working on at the moment.
MG: Right now I’m writing my way through desert warfare and the politics behind it. The stories are fictional explorations of a particular and complex war, drawing on my experience as witness as well as my subsequent research.

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk

My Festival #7: Conrad Williams

2011-10-05T12:28:00.000+01:00

Each week, a writer from Manchester lets us know which of this year's MLF events they've circled in red in the programme.

Conrad Williams is the author of seven novels, including The Unblemished (winner of the International Horror Guild Award) and One (winner of the British Fantasy Award). He has also written four novellas including The Scalding Rooms, which beat his own Rain to the British Fantasy Award in 2008. He has around 100 short stories to his name, some of which are collected in Use Once Then Destroy and, forthcoming from PS Publishing, Open Heart Surgery. As Nuala Deuel, he ghost-wrote Princess Spider: True Confessions Of A Dominatrix, which was translated into German and Italian. He lives in Manchester with his wife, three sons and a big Maine Coon. His latest novel is Loss Of Separation. Find out more here.

I'm looking forward to a number of events at this year's MLF. Chief among them is Crime In A Cold Climate. I'm a fan of Henning Mankel anyway, but it's interesting how Scandinavian crime fiction has gone critical over the past five years or so. Perhaps the wilderness, the geographical (and human) isolation and the glacial pace of much of that milieu is a reaction to the fast cuts of American crime fiction that has been part of our staple diet recently, in books as well as on TV. Having published my first crime novel last year (Blonde On A Stick), I'm keen to keep track of the current trends in that genre, and see which new writers to keep an eye on.

I'm also keen to attend the Literary Reputations event concerning Katherine Mansfield, whose short stories I'm a big fan of (I'd have to say Feuille d'Album is my favourite). Though the words a writer dedicates to the page are the most important thing, it's always interesting to find out a little more about a writer's life and Kathleen Jones promises an absorbing evening. At the end of it, I'm sure I'll be scurrying back to my copies of The Garden Party and Bliss.

Over the past year my sons have become ravenous, independent readers which is a joy to see in this modern world where there are countless bright, shiny, electronic things trying to grab their attention. As a treat for them, I think I'll take them along to see Francesca Simon (they both love Horrid Henry) and the launch of her new novel, The Sleeping Army, which sounds just their kind of thing.

Conrad's Festival favourites
Crime In A Cold Climate Monday 17th October, 7.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation (£5/£3 concs)
Literary Reputations: Kathleen Jones on Katherine Mansfield Wednesday 19th October, 1pm, Manchester City Library (free, but booking is advised)
Francesca Simon Sunday 23rd October, 5pm, Whitworth Art Gallery (£5)

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk

Theme #5: Words and Music

2011-10-04T11:15:00.001+01:00

In the fifth of our series written by members of the team, Manchester Literature Festival Coordinator Jon Atkin tells us the theme he's really looking forward to at this year's Festival.

Inspired by the piano-playing Filip Topol at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation at last year’s Festival, I’m really looking forward to more musical-themed events this time round. I heard about one almost by accident. At last year’s Historical Readers Day, I got talking to novelist Sarah Dunant who had just delivered a spell-binding masterclass in writing about the past. She told me that she had started to collaborate with early music group Musica Secreta on a semi-dramatised version of her atmospheric novel Sacred Hearts, about cloistered nuns in 16th-century Ferrara. The choir took the parts of the nuns, singing some of the actual music that visitors to the convent would have heard, while Dunant and a couple of actors narrated the story.

My imagination fired up, I asked her if she would be interested in bringing the event to the 2011 festival. Happily, she seemed very keen. We already had a venue in mind, as MLF had done a number of events at Manchester Cathedral, including another semi-staged event with Margaret Atwood in 2008. Things came together quite quickly after that and I’m very excited to see the event is booking up fast. So don’t miss this unique opportunity to experience a thrilling combination of words and music! Sacred Hearts will be at Manchester Cathedral on Sunday 16th October from 7.30pm. Tickets are £12/£10 concs*.

The day before, MLF presents another event featuring a melding of spoken word and music: Portrait of Words and Music (Saturday 15th October, 7.30pm, Royal Northern College of Music, £10) is a wonderful collaboration between local poet Michael Symmons Roberts and Manchester Camerata. This time, it was the Camerata that approached the Festival, looking to find new ways to present music to local audiences. We were happy to help and Michael was asked to write some new poetry in response to the specific programme for the evening.

He was the perfect choice as he has already worked with composer James MacMillan on numerous collaborative projects and so was already well versed in that milieu. It will be interesting to see how he interprets a varied musical menu which includes the "traditional" Mozart and the more "modern" Benjamin Britten. He will, of course, be reading his newly crafted poems on stage at the RNCM on the night, alongside the marvellous music. With the combination of a top poet and a leading orchestra, it sounds to me like an event no one will want to miss!

With both these events on the same weekend, audiences will be spoilt for choice when it comes to unusual and unique events, courtesy of Manchester Literature Festival. And you don’t even have to choose; simply book for both!

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk

*If you are part of a reading group or want to arrange a night out with a group of book-loving friends, why not take advantage of our special MLF Reading Group Ticket Offer for this event. Book for four or more people and get all your tickets at the concessionary rate of £10. The offer is available online or by phoning our Box Office on 0843 208 0500 and quoting MLF Reading Group Offer at the time of booking.

Writes & Reads #5: Jerome de Groot

2011-10-03T12:46:00.000+01:00

In this weekly slot, we talk to some of the writers involved in Manchester Literature Festival 2011.

Jerome de Groot teaches English at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Consuming History (2008) and The Historical Novel (2009), and runs the Meet The Readers blog about reading historical fiction (take the survey here). He writes about historical fiction for History Today and BBC History. He is also the chair of the board of trustees for the Manchester Literature Festival, and will be chairing the discussion between Navtej Sarna and Shrabani Basu a fortnight from now on Monday 17 October (6pm, Waterstone's Deansgate)* as well as debating the pros and cons of literary prizes with MJ Hyland, John McAuliffe and other writers on Tuesday 18 October (7.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation).

MLF: List your top three favourite books...
JdG: Margaret Atwood, Surfacing; PG Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.

MLF: What are you reading right now?
JdG: Trying to finish Matthew Neale's English Passengers, reading various historical novels for my round-up review for History Today, reading tracts and pamphlets and poems from the 1640s to prepare for some of my teaching, and, for good measure, working my way through Claire Tomalin's new biography of Dickens.

MLF: How did you get to this point in your writing career?
JdG: Luck, hard work, cheek and chance, mainly. I wrote my first book on the 1640s and then swerved quite spectacularly in another direction.

MLF: Who would you cite as your biggest influence, be they another writer, an artist, a musician, a Premier League footballer…
JdG: Raphael Samuel, social historian and author of Theatres Of Memory.

MLF: Which events in this year’s MLF programme are must-sees for you?
JdG: Sean O'Brien is always great, and I am excited about Claire Tomalin, and the Sacred Hearts/Sarah Dunant event. For me the best events in the MLF are always the ones you aren't expecting.

MLF: Tell us about what you’re working on at the moment.
JdG: I'm writing about smoking and history (if anyone has seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, they will know what I am talking about...).

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk

*If you are part of a reading group or want to arrange a night out with a group of book-loving friends, why not take advantage of our special MLF Reading Group Ticket Offer for the discussion between Navtej Sarna and Shrabani Basu. Book for four or more people and get all your tickets at the concessionary rate of £3. The offer is available online or by phoning our Box Office on 0843 208 0500 and quoting MLF Reading Group Offer at the time of booking.

Theme #4: Literary Tours

2011-09-30T14:49:00.000+01:00

Digital Marketing Assistant Sarah-Clare Conlon picks another theme running during this year's Festival: literary tours of the city.

Our Principal Sponsor for the 2011 Festival, HSBC Premier - HSBC’s premium banking service - has specially commissioned a series of free one-hour literary tours to celebrate its sponsorship of Manchester Literature Festival, a highlight of the bank’s global Cultural Exchange programme.

On various dates throughout the Festival, visitors can join Blue Badge Guide and Manchester Confidential Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Schofield (pictured) to uncover the fascinating literary history of the city and find out more about the writers who have lived, worked and travelled here.

Tours depart from HSBC St Ann’s Square on the following dates:

Wednesday 12 October, 2-3pm
Friday 14 October, 2-3pm
Saturday 15 October, 4-5pm
Sunday 16 October, 4-5pm
Wednesday 19 October, 4-5pm
Friday 21 October, 2-3pm
Saturday 22 October, 2-3pm

Places are free but limited - click here to find out more and to book. HSBC Premier customers can also enquire in branch at St Ann’s Square and via their Relationship Manager. Click here to find out more about HSBC Premier and the services on offer.

Don't forget, Manchester Literature Festival is also running a number of bespoke literary tours as part of the main programme. Ever popular, two of the tours - of the Midland Hotel with historian Barbara Frost and the guided walk Poems Of The City by Anne Beswick - have already sold out. You still have chance to book for the Anthony Burgess coach and walking tour, which leaves from Manchester Cathedral at 11am on Saturday 15 October (£15), and the Boho Literary Pub Walk, which is back by popular demand and takes in the watering holes of Manchester's literati, and leaves from the Midland Hotel on Saturday 22 October at 5pm (£6), both led by Ed Glinert of last year's sell-out Elizabeth Gaskell Tour.

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk.

My Festival #6: Adrian Slatcher

2011-09-29T14:02:00.001+01:00

We've been inviting various Manchester-based writers to share with us the Manchester Literature Festival 2011 events they're most excited about.

Today, it's the turn of Adrian Slatcher, who blogs about literary matters on Art Of Fiction and writes poetry and prose. His poetry collection Extracts From Levona was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons press in 2010 and Playing Solitaire For Money is out on the Salt Modern Voices imprint from Salt Publishing. He has a story in the new flash fiction anthology Quickies: Short Stories For Adults, which is available to buy via the FlashTag website and on Kindle.

Here are my three "pick of the Festival" events: among a wide range of fascinating sessions, these are the three that I really will have to make sure I attend. Covering both poetry and fiction, and ranging across Britain, Europe and China, they highlight the Festival's diversity - and I'd recommend them to anyone who is looking for something a little different within this year's festival line-up.

First up: European Poetry Night. Ágnes Lehóczky's Egg Box collection Budapest To Babel is one of my favourite poetry collections of recent years. Writing in English, but with a distinctly European sensibility, this Hungarian poet's work is lyrical, but experimental. I'll be fascinated to hear her and the other European poets - Lithuanian Marcelijus Martinaitis and Dutch Toon Tellegen - on this well-curated evening.

BS Johnson is that anomaly: a British experimental writer who worked in the Midlands (where I'm orginally from), yet for Johnson, experiment was always about telling the truth. A larger than life character, he was also a sports reporter and TV producer. This evening looks like it will give a suitably slanted take on a fascinating, and often overlooked "giant" in every way.

I met the brilliant Chinese film-maker/writer Zhu Wen a couple of years ago in Norwich. A formidable and original talent, the stories I Love Dollars will appeal to anyone who loves contemporary noir. In conversation with his translator, Julia Lovell, this event is certain to be both entertaining and illuminating about film and literature, about translation, and about contemporary Chinese fiction.

Adrian's Festival favourites
European Poetry Night Friday 21st October, 6pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation (£5/£3 concs)
'The Mind Has Fuses': A Celebration of BS Johnson Saturday 22nd October, 6pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation (£5/£3 concs)
Zhu Wen Sunday 23rd October, 4pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation (£5/£3 concs)

For full details of all events at MLF 2011 and how to book, visit the website at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk