This event honours the memory of writer Caroline Chisholm (MA Creative Writing, 2013), who was a valued member of the Centre for New Writing community. Sara Collins is of Jamaican descent and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years in Cayman, before admitting that what she really wanted to do was write novels. She studied […]
A workshop for young writers who love the gruesome, spooky or macabre. Join award-winning Young Adult authors Catherine Johnson and Chris Priestley for an afternoon of reading and writing, and have a go at creating your own ‘tales of terror’. Catherine Johnson is the writer of several historical novels, including the forensic crime thrillers Sawbones […]
The stunning debut collections by two rising stars of poetry – Raymond Antrobus and Jay Bernard – move the voices of marginalised people to front and centre. Winner of the TS Eliot Prize, Raymond’s The Perseverance explores his relationship with his father alongside the D/deaf experience, rewriting versions presented by the hearing. In Surge, Jay […]
Do we shape the landscape or does the landscape shape us? In their stunning debut novels, Jessica Andrews (Saltwater) and Helen Mort (Black Car Burning) consider the impact of city and countryside on the lives and bodies of their characters. In Saltwater, a young working-class woman moves from London to the coasts of Donegal, while […]
For the 2019 Anthony Burgess Lecture, the novelist and biographer Dame Margaret Drabble will present a specially commissioned talk on literary reputations. Taking Anthony Burgess’s grand, late bid for immortality, Earthly Powers, as a starting point, the lecture will explore how we remember writers and the power of posterity. Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield […]
Sarah Hall returns with her stunning new collection Sudden Traveller. Exploring themes of identity, eroticism and existentialism, her stories travel the borders of life and death, past and present, the real and the mythical. Declared ‘a genius’ by Jessie Burton, and shortlisted three times for the BBC National Short Story Award (winning with Mrs Fox […]
In his dystopian new novel, The Wall, John Lanchester imagines what might happen if we built a wall around the UK coastline to keep ‘the Others’ out. Beaches no longer exist and the sea can only be viewed from high ground, but everyone’s safe – in theory. Are the Others really that different to us? […]
In the centenary year of the Bauhaus school of art and design, you’re likely to hear about Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and not so much about the women photographers, designers and weavers. Digging through the audio-visual archives, and profiling some of the most exciting artists of the 1920s avantgarde, novelist Naomi Wood […]
What might Palestine look like in 2048, a century after the Nakba when 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were forced to flee their homes? In the anthology Palestine +100, ten contemporary Palestinian writers respond to this question through speculative fiction, considering the repercussions of war, economic blockades, humanitarian crises and political isolation. Two of the writers, Selma […]
Manchester Literature Festival: Chen Qiufan & Xia Jia