Family Secrets – The trials and tribulations of a deranged public

19th October

Though she is given a microphone, Chinese short story writer and poet, Ding Liying, is barely audible as she begins reading her featured short story, Family Secrets. The story's English translation is projected on to a screen and the audience holds its collective breath in order to hear her unfamiliar sounds and try to piece together the correlation.

And it's difficult: it's possible to understand the intention, the emotion, of other European languages of which I don't have any knowledge, but I find it impossible to know where in the story Ding Liying is currently reading.

Nicky Harman, who has translated this piece amongst many, many others, agrees. Prompted by a question from the audience, we learn that translation cannot be attempted without a full grasp of cultural context - though British, Irish and American literature is very popular in China, Liying explains. Her favourite is James Joyce's The Dubliners, which lends to a comment that there have been two translations of Ulysses in recent years, one of which took over ten years to complete.

Wild Swans-type literary trends, plus the assumption that Chinese arts are stifled by state censorship (as is touched on in the question and answer session), has perhaps given rise to the assumption that Chinese literature is austere, heavy-going, politicised, concerned with toil and struggle.

But here we are presented with Liying's hilarious account of a newspaper agony aunt, forced to listen to the trials and tribulations of a deranged public. A young woman threatens to jump off Shanghai's tallest tower; the agony aunt tells her the tower isn't complete yet. A man calls to ask whether suffering with gonorrhea is similar to that of suffering with a common cold, and our protagonist is left speechless.

However, the audience is left on tenterhooks at the most poignant moment of the story - the most developed character has been introduced, and we have to wait a couple of days before the final story will be posted on the Manchester Literature Festival website.

The audience are noticeably disappointed, especially as it is clear this event is flying by at tremendous speed, but inevitably they will welcome the return journey into Ding Liying's world when they arrive online at her completed story.

by Sophie Parkes

Sophie is a literature and folk music enthusiast who runs a folk music night and blog not-so-wittily entitled, For Folk's Sake

You can now read the whole of Ding's translated story on MLF's Commissions page.

Words and pictures make for an inspired lunch date with Pascale Petit

19th October

Where could be a more appropriate setting to host the event Poems After Frida Kahlo than Manchester Art Gallery; home to some of the painter’s work during last year’s controversial Surrealist show Angels Of Anarchy. Practically all the seats have been filled by the time I arrive just before the 1pm start; everyone is obviously very eager to hear Pascale Petit read from her new collection, What The Water Gave Me (shortlisted two days later for the TS Eliot Prize For Poetry).

Originally envisaged as a pamphlet, the project snowballed and the resulting book encompasses 52 poems, all “spoken” in the Mexican artist’s voice and all taking the title of a Kahlo work (some paintings have more than one poem, hence 1, 2, 3 and so on). Petit, when asked during the Q&A session at the end why she embarked on such an undertaking, explains that while she was studying for an MA in sculpture, her tutor drew similarities between her studio and Kahlo’s famous Blue House (La Casa Azul) in Coyoacán. Petit also feels drawn to her fragile yet powerful character, and is obviously intrigued by her tragedy-stricken early years and somewhat eccentric adult life, right down to her crazy cremation.

Petit’s eyes are alive as she admits how jealous she is of Kahlo’s menagerie, which included a deer, a goat, parrots and the spider monkeys that put in an appearance in Self-portrait With Four Monkeys. “There are so many anguished paintings,” says Petit, “but this is a happy one, I’ve decided.” The language contained within the accompanying poem underlines this: one line describes the monkeys picking up tubes of paint of the “juiciest colours” with their tails; another ends “Release the flames of the bird of paradise flower”.

The naturalistic imagery is immense (“candelabra cacti” a particular example that sticks in my mind), as is the use of colour to conjure up both emotion (“white pain”) and setting: “watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange” sum up the Mexican landscape perfectly. It’s obvious the material world had a huge effect on Kahlo, and this is emphasised by Petit reciting her poems with the related painting looming large on the screen behind her. The Broken Column shows Kahlo’s body reflecting the cracks in the lava field desert, near where she lived south of Mexico City, and this, in turn, is reflected in the physical words chosen for Petit’s accompanying piece.

By the end, I’ve lost track of how many poems we’ve heard and how many paintings we’ve seen, but I’ve learnt a lot about the life and loves of Frida Kahlo and I’m struck by how personable the talented Pascale Petit is. She is as much inspiring as she was herself inspired.

by Sarah-Clare Conlon

Sarah-Clare is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. She is the co-creator of Ask Ben & Clare, author of the award-winning Words & Fixtures, and regular contributor to Manchester Blog Awards 2010 Best New Blog 330 Words.

Beatlemania and fire alarms

Lars Saabye Christensen, 19th October

Lars Saabye Christensen is an award-winning author, whose acclaimed novel Beatles was published in Norway in 1984, but only reached the UK in translation by Don Bartlett in 2009. His work was translated into English after a meeting between his Norwegian publisher and Arcadia Books at the Gothenburg Book Fair. Beatles has been highly successful and critically acclaimed since its release in English by Arcadia.

NICE Nordic Festival of Art and Culture and Manchester Literature Festival’s day of events focused on international writing and translation kicked off in the richly decorated Lord Mayor’s Parlour in the Town Hall on Albert Square with a discussion of translation and writing by Lars and his publisher. Although he has been writing in Norway since the early 1980s, Lars’ work has only recently been translated into English.

The event began with a reading in English and Norwegian by Lars, which gave us a sense of how different the two languages sound. Lars then discussed his views on writing, translation, and his other passion, music. To Lars, “translation is a fragile thing, a transportation of stories to other countries”. He described translation as a difficult craft, and translators as “ambassadors of literature”. When asked by an audience member how he felt about how accurately his work should be translated into other languages, he was clear that a bad translation could spoil a good novel, but that he felt that capturing the essence of a story, the “atmosphere of the building of the story” was more important than getting every word exactly right.

He decided to become a writer at the age of thirteen, he laughs, when he lost his hair. You don’t have a history at thirteen, he says, “you’re empty”, but he also began writing seriously with a group of adolescents who shared his love of poetry and literature, kept secret and possibly reflected in the four boys in Beatles and their adoration of music.

He describes timing as crucial to writing, completing Beatles at the end of the 70s, when he said the memories were still strong but he had the distance to appreciate the time without bias. However, when asked why he wrote the book, he laughs again and says, “I wanted to get revenge.”

“On who?” asks Gary, his erstwhile publisher.

“All my teachers, girls,” says Lars.

“And did you?”

“No,” he says.

He is a master of the anecdote, demonstrating the key skills of a great author lie not just in beautiful use of language but in the ability to pluck all manner of events both dramatic and mundane and make of them stories.

So far, Lars’ experience of Manchester has largely involved unexpected fire alarms. After an early morning wake-up call with an alarm at his hotel, he was interrupted halfway through his own event at Manchester’s sumptuous Town Hall by the screech of a fire siren going off. What makes Lars a great writer was what happened after we had all tipped out into the rain with the attendees of a tea dance in the main hall opposite.

Once we had all settled back into our seats, Lars told us the story of how he had been awoken by a fire alarm. When a fire alarm goes off, like most people, he looked around trying to decide what to take with him. None of us follow the instructions to leave immediately, getting dressed and picking up possessions to take with us. Lars described how he had pottered about the hotel room, selecting items to take. This, he tells us, is what writing is all about: taking experiences, “collecting them”, and saving them up for some moment when they can be taken out and used in writing.

Suddenly, a distraction that might have spoiled the event, actually provided a live example of how a writer works. While the organisers were cringing in embarrassment, Lars was amused and turned the whole thing on its head. We were also treated to what must be every writer’s worst nightmare: the loss of a handwritten manuscript in a suitcase on the way back from France. This, he said, was the point where he became a serious writer as he waited three days for the return of something that simply couldn’t be replaced.

His passion for writing is only matched by that for music. He described the two as completely contrasting, and yet also complementary. “Writing is a very private thing,” he says, but after ten months of isolation with his work, “it’s time to play,” and he turns to music and public performances. His love of music spills over into his writing, and many of his metaphors are musical. It’s clear from both his writing and speaking why he’s been such a success both in Norwegian and in English, and we look forward to seeing more of his work translated.

by Joely Black

Joely Black is a freelance writer and author who writes epic fantasy and drinks large quantities of tea. Two of her books, The Execution and The Inheritor, are available as ebooks from Smashwords.

Burgess the polymath

Burgess’ Manchester, 18th October

I hadn’t visited the International Anthony Burgess Foundation before. Turning off Whitworth Street West on a dark autumn evening, and walking towards the mills on Cambridge Street feels a little like going back in time. However, the interior of Chorlton Mill, which houses the foundation, is smart and airy, with exposed brick and bright lighting. It was set up in 2003 by Burgess’s widow Liana and has a library, study centre and archive with many of Burgess’s books, music and papers.

I manage to resist the licensed cafe which greets me as soon as I enter the building. It’s run by The Modern Caterer, and I’m a big fan of their outlet at The Whitworth Gallery, so I commend myself on my restraint. Other attendees, including the speaker, are less restrained and take their beers into the lecture room with them. I haven’t been to a lecture since my university days, when taking beer into lectures was definitely forbidden. Clearly, this is not going to be a stuffy occasion.

The topic of the inaugural Anthony Burgess lecture, is Burgess’s Manchester. Our speaker, Manchester Confidential Editor Jonathan Schofield, is well known for leading walking tours around Manchester. He accompanies his lecture with a selection of slides showing period photographs of the parts of Manchester that featured in Burgess’s youth and shaped the writer he would become. These are not always in the right order, but that just adds to the laid back style of the talk.

Schofield chooses to set the scene by referring to Burgess’s entry on Wikipedia, in order to explain his description of Burgess as a “polymath”. A vast list of occupations is given, followed by an equally expansive range of genre and subjects, including faith, lust, marriage and evil. It certainly underlines the extent of the writer’s achievements and is a good introduction for those of us who may know Burgess mainly for one or two works.

An hour of readings, anecdotes and discussion follows, in which Schofield focuses on the humour in Burgess’s work and how this was informed by his Mancunian upbringing. I leave the Anthony Burgess Foundation with a strong desire to read more of Burgess’s vast catalogue of work, and also a plan to make a return visit to this excellent venue.

by Kath Horwill

Kath Horwill is a Manchester-based freelance writer and blogs at Parklover and writes for a variety of online and print publications.

Dirty radiance: a tribute to Roy Fisher

18th October

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to attend your own funeral, and to hear the kind (or other) words of your friends? For Roy Fisher, sitting in a full house at the John Thaw Studio Theatre, there must have been a flavour of that macabre pleasure last night.

Ian Pople introduced him as ‘the most appreciated under-appreciated poet I know.’ Fisher’s work was quoted, discussed and celebrated by fine poets including Fleur Adcock, Jon Glover and Michael Symmons Roberts. Their own styles are markedly different, but they were unanimous in their gratitude and warmth for a poet who has influenced them all. Jon Glover spoke of Roy’s technical innovations – his circular poems or sequences, his collaborations with artists like Derrick Greaves – and of his humour, quoting The Billiard Table: ‘Have you ever felt/ We’ve just been issued with each other/ Like regulation lockers/ And left to get on with it?’

Anyone of whom Fleur Adcock can say, ‘He’s a real poet and the rest of us are just shuffling along, pretending,’ might allow his head to swell a little. Yet each poet spoke of his modesty, and I got a glimpse of it too. I mentioned to Roy a mutual friend who had played with him in a jazz band. ‘I don’t suppose he knew I wrote poetry,’ said Roy. ‘Well, you can’t go on about it, can you?’

I rather wished that Robert Sheppard shared that approach, as he delivered a short lecture (and not that short either) of deep textual analysis which made no concessions to a live audience. Sheppard spoke of ‘epistemological anarchism’. Others reminded us of the range and scale of Fisher’s work – the long and influential poems City and A Furnace which showed so many poets how to tackle the ‘dirty radiance’ of real places that we belong to, and which belong to us. Jeffrey Wainwright brought us right back to the coal face, with prose poem Uncle Jim’s Will. It’s quirky, wilful, mischievous and masterful. Jim leaves his Certificate of Unfitness for Military Service to the Imperial War Museum and his mistress to his son, ‘without responsibility for maintenance.’ It was a brilliant reminder that funny poetry can be serious, and vice versa.

The ‘precision of generosity’ that runs through Fisher’s work was much quoted, and much in evidence. Peter Robinson quoted John Ash: ‘In a better world, Roy Fisher would be as highly thought of as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.’ As Robinson wrily added; ‘There is no such better world – and so we had better appreciate him in this one.’

To listen to Roy Fisher’s Birmingham River, click here

Jo Bell is a poetry professional based in the NW. She is the director of National Poetry Day and the co-founder of the Bugged project. Find out more about Jo and Bugged at www.jobell.org.uk.

"The iron hammers of the age"

Jáchym and Filip Topol, 18th October


The International Anthony Burgess Foundation was the perfect venue for this evening of music and literature borne of the struggle for free speech and liberty. Czech writer Jáchym Topol (pictured above in conversation with Alexandra Buchler from Literature Across Frontiers) and his musician brother Filip, are sons of a prominent dissident intellectual. Their lives and careers have been inextricably intertwined with the turbulent course of post-war European history.


Filip Topol began his performing career aged just twelve, when he played for the playwright and future President, Vaclav Hável. Apologising for his English, which, he declared, is “not too beautiful” he transfixed the audience with his driving, percussive piano playing. A dynamic performer, the drama of his playing was nicely offset by his understated, husky vocals; he has released many albums as a solo artist and band member, and the versatility of his style encompasses elements of Central European folk music, modern classical, even a touch of klezmer. The clear acoustics of the IABF work admirably, and the centre shows great promise as a music venue.


Attention then turned to the elder Topol brother, Jáchym, a well-known poet, novelist and journalist in the Czech Republic whose work has only recently begun to appear in English. Hearing him read from his new novel, Gargling With Tar, in Czech showed him to be an animated reader who clearly loves the language he works in. The novel itself concerns the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Topol’s protagonist, a young boy growing up in an orphanage, greets the coming Russian troops with a mixture of horror and fascination. This is not so much history reclaimed as re-imagined; Topol imagines an uprising against the invading forces that never in fact happened and this, he tells the audience, is the central irony of the book. From the extracts Topol reads, it seems that stylistically the book draws on both fairy tale and disaster movie idioms to convey the trauma of the child’s experience of conflict. It begins, “the sky is falling down”.


Between readings, Topol talks of himself and his career. He speaks of his admiration for Anthony Burgess, whom he discovered as a teenager through a samizdat edition of A Clockwork Orange. It made him feel he had encountered a prophet. It is apposite that this writer, whose career is bound up with the struggle for free speech, should be reading in this venue name for another novelist who fought the censor’s pen. Jáchym Topol clearly values the free speech so recently granted to much of Europe. Yet he is thoughtful about some of its consequences; he worries that, in a world where everyone talks, writes and comments constantly, it becomes harder to say anything meaningful. Where everything can be said, words perhaps lose their impact. There is no hint of nostalgia in Topol’s meditation on mass communication; but he offers a timely reminder of one of the paradoxes of a situation where capitalism has triumphed: the freedoms that it offers become harder to appreciate.


Jáchym Topol is clearly a bold and innovative talent, and his work promises to be a fascinating addition to European literature in English. His work offers an insight into a tumultuous time still fresh in the memories of many, but rarely represented in literature. This event was thoroughly enjoyable for the sheer quality of the Topol brothers’ work, and the knowledge that we are privileged with the liberty to experience it gave it an unforgettable vitality.


by Elinor Taylor

Elinor studied Philosophy at Manchester University. She is currently studying for a PhD on Nineteen Thirties fiction at the University of Salford, where she also teaches Creative Writing.

Pushing Boundaries – Bewilderbliss and Corridor8

Cornerhouse, 18th October

Day 5 of the Manchester Literarature Festival opens with talks and readings from the editors and writers from two independent literary success stories: Bewilderbliss and Corridor8.

Whilst their content is markedly different, their mission statement is sharply in harmony: to push the boundaries of literary and artistic output, providing a mouthpiece for up-and-coming (and occasionally more established) local talent within the North. The event itself is in the relatively new, oak-beamed annexe of The Cornerhouse cinema. It is only a 55-seater venue for today but in no time at all, the seats have all been filled and a crowd of perspiring bodies is beginning to huddle together at the back of the room, testament to the popularity of these two publications, especially considering that this is a week-day, lunchtime talk.

Bewilderbliss kick off proceedings with a talk given by the two outgoing editors, John and Matt, who, in turn, inherited the publication from a previous team formed from the pool of creative talent at both the writing school at MMU and the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University. It is this process of a literary magazine that is regularly “bequeathed” to new blood that perhaps keeps it so fresh, and looking at the editions of the magazine that are on sale, one can clearly see a sense of progression and evolution, the physical product, over time, moving more towards an aesthetically pleasing publication. It becomes apparent that this is a deliberate motivation for the editors, shifting towards a magazine which the consumer would feel “proud to have on their bookshelf.” In fact, after the hand-over, the new editors’ first task was to reduce the 250-copy print-run to a run just over 100, thus allowing them to improve the overall aesthetic quality.

As pointed out, the magazine is enthusiastically committed to the lively literary sphere in Manchester but it also becomes clear that it is also interested in the dark, edgy underbelly of society and of the creative arts, an element conveyed by the readings themselves: a bleakly atmospheric tale of a child’s funeral, the mother-narrator barely able to conceal her seething anger and guilt; poetry dealing with the inevitable, wrenching collapse of a too-intense relationship (as the poet himself says, “Another poem to slit your wrists to); and, in a particularly vivid contribution, a surreal modern fairytale of a mysterious sweet-stall marketer who captures the townsfolk in her thrall through the bizarre, addictive and magical properties of the sweetmeats she sells.

Next up is Corridor8 who, despite being slightly more mainstream due to its Arts Council funding, still continue to be innovative and daring. The floor is held, chiefly, by leonine-haired editor Roger McKinley with occasional corrective blurts from his publisher and partner in the magazine, Michael Butterworth. McKinley’s opening gambit is an apology for his poor public speaking, yet he proves to be a charming, anecdotal orator.

Corridor8 (taking its name from the fact that Butterworth’s previous 1960’s publication, Corridor, ended its limited run on issue 7) is very much committed to crossing the boundary between literature and conceptual art. McKinley’s first foray into this arena was his project, Jackson Pollock: The Musical, published by Butterworth and marking the start of their current working relationship.

The primary focus of the magazine (the first edition of which being an impressive large-scale collage of breathtaking photography and literary articles concerning the “supercity corridor” between Liverpool and Hull) is to encourage and develop art and literature in the North of England. Their next edition, which is out next Monday and significantly more “pocket-sized”, will deal with issues outside of the “urban” landscape, focusing more on the rural “borderlands”, the residences where isolation and “break-downs” can occur. To highlight this, Ian McGuire, lecturer in creative writing at the Centre for New Writing, performs a reading from a new short story due to be published in the aforementioned second issue of Corridor8.

The editors freely admit that including fiction, rather than literary non-fiction, is new territory for them but that this constant exploration of different possibilities is the driving force behind the magazine. This story is a triumph, satirically detailing the plight of a blocked writer who is commissioned to isolate himself in a rural cave in order to write a think-piece about the nature of place and existence. More than once the audience are reduced to tears of laughter through McGuire’s subtle wit and deadpan delivery, and we are tantalisingly left wanting more.

In the current climate of radical cuts to arts funding and the ever-looming governmental spending review, it is essential that publications like Bewilderbliss and Corridor8 keep on fighting, keep on creating, keep on thriving, providing new ways to entertain and engage their audiences and today’s event highlights just how important the independent publishing sector is to the development and sustenance of culture in our society.

by Matt Colbeck

Matt Colbeck is currently studying for his PhD in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He can be frequently seen performing in his band CreepJoint around the Midlands: www.myspace.com/creepjointmusic