Celebrating the sixth year of the Gothic Manchester Festival, Twisted Tales of Hybridity will bring together three authors who have all appeared in previous years; Rosie Garland (‘Vixen’ and ‘The Night Brother’); Helen Marshall (‘Hair Side, Flesh Side’ and ‘Gifts for the One Who Comes After’) and Laura Mauro (‘Naming the Bones’) to explore how hybridity informs their work. The event will feature a reading from each author, a panel discussion, and Q&A. It will be followed by a signing session.

Rosie Garland (pictured below) is a novelist, poet and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. She also performs as The Time-Travelling Suffragette and as alter-ego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen. Her latest novel ‘The Night Brother’ (Borough Press) is out now. Her latest poetry collection is ‘As In Judy’ (Flapjack Press). Debut novel, ‘The Palace of Curiosities’, was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and the Polari First Book Prize and ‘Vixen’ was a Green Carnation Prize nominee.

Helen Marshall is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She is also the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy there. Her first collection of fiction, ‘Hair Side, Flesh Side’, won the Sydney J Bounds Award. Her second collection ‘Gifts for the One Who Comes After’ negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition and won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel ‘The Migration’ will be released in 2019.

Mild-mannered laboratory technician by day, Laura Mauro was born in south east London and currently lives in Essex under extreme duress. Her work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees and a variety of anthologies. Her debut novella ‘Naming the Bones’ was published in 2017. She is currently studying towards a Master’s in Modern and Contemporary Literature, which mostly involves pretending to have read James Joyce’s Ulysses. In her spare time, she collects tattoos, dyes her hair strange colours, and blogs sporadically at www.lauramauro.com.