Review of ‘Penelope Lively: A Reading Life’, by Zoe Weldon 10th October 7.30pm Whitworth Art Gallery £10/8 entry I am afraid to admit that thus far, I have ignored the cultural and artistic imperative to visit the Whitworth Art Gallery and so, the visit held many firsts for me; my first time to the gallery, […]
Archive by Author
Salley Vickers, reviewed by Leo Mercer
Vickers and Cathedrals Leo Mercer A hundred people gathered in Manchester Cathedral on Thursday night – not for a bible reading, but for a book reading, party of the Manchester Literature Festival. There could be no more appropriate place in town for author Salley Vickers to introduce her new novel, The Cleaner of Chartres, which […]
Penelope Lively at the Whitworth, reviewed by Sam Rigby
Penelope Lively and the Power of Reading Penelope Lively: A Reading Life at Manchester Literature Festival, Wednesday 10th October 2012 at Whitworth Art Gallery, 7.30pm The books we read in our youth can stay with us forever, perhaps unconsciously and perhaps to be forgotten about until a much later point in our lives. This was […]
Tamara Stanton on Constantine and Huelle
Review of David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October 2012 On Monday I heard the celebrated novelists, Salford-born David Constantine, and Gdansk-born Pawel Huelle each read one of their short stories at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Constantine read ‘Asylum’, a story of a disturbed teenager in a psychiatric institution who is encouraged by a […]
David Constantine and Pawel Huelle, Manchester Literature Festial, reviewed by Jessica Skoog
“We are all refugees” By Jessica Skoog Review of David Constantine and Pawel Huelle at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, October 8, 2012 As I hand my ticket to the event host, I feel an excitement akin to a child going on a carnival ride. There, just beyond the thick black curtain, awaits […]
David Constantine and Pawel Huelle, Manchester Literature Festival, reviewed by Nathaniel Ogle
Homes Away From Home at Manchester Literature Festival Event: David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October, 6:00pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation To the mild stupefaction of the staff in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, I arrive to this—the second event of the first day of the Manchester Literature Festival, and, incidentally, the first event of […]
The Heretic, The Lowry, reviewed by Amy Kilvington
The description of Richard Bean’s The Heretic as a ‘hilarious comedy’ rings true in The Library Theatre’s current production. Eccentric characters, clever scripting and an original angle all contribute to the success of the play, which received much audience appreciation throughout. Telling the story of Dr Diane Cassell, the black sheep of the science department […]
Two Collections from Paul Mills, reviewed by James McGrath
Paul Mills, Voting for Spring (Smith/Doorstop, £9.95) and You Should’ve Seen Us, (Smith/Doorstop) £6.95 Paul Mills, at a reading in York in the late 1990s, was the first writer I ever heard to suggest that the next major movement in poetry and also literary theory would have ‘something to do with the environment. It’s inevitable’. […]
Country Wife, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Naya Tsentourou
The Country Wife – Royal Exchange, Manchester Naya Tsentourou It’s not often that Restoration comedy arrives in Manchester. When it does, however, the genre’s poignant social critique, its unconventional values, and its celebration of playhouses find in the city’s culture a perfect fit. Polly Findlay’s production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, first performed in […]
Terry Jones, Furious Resonance, Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series 5
How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going […]
The Daughter-in-Law, The Lowry, reviewed by Howard Booth
Lawrence’s play The Daughter-in-Law is widely held to be one of the most important British plays written between the 1890s and the 1950s. Productions are not exactly ten a penny, so this one by Library Theatre at the Lowry was very welcome. Though excellent in some respects it did show that we still don’t have […]
“Colm Tóibín in Conversation” with Roy Foster, March 12th 2012
Roy Foster, author of many books on the political, social, cultural and literary history of Ireland, joins Colm Tóibín at the Martin Harris Centre. They discuss the politics of Irish history and the debates surrounding Foster’s own “revisionist” work. Download MP3 1’08” (34MB)
Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson, Twice in a Lifetime (Comma Press)
Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson is one of Iceland’s most practiced practitioners of short fiction, dedicating himself to the form long after his peers had moved onto writing novels. He too has now moved onto the longer form, but before he did so he published five volumes of short stories of which Twice in a Lifetime was […]
“Colm Tóibín in Conversation” with Alan Hollinghurst, October 10th 2011
Acclaimed novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín, newly appointed as Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, hosts the first in a series of high-profile public events. The conversations cover topics of current literary and cultural interest. In this first event Colm Tóibín welcomes English novelist, and winner of the […]
Maurice Carême, Défier le destin – Defying Fate, trans. by Christopher Pilling (Arc Publications) £9.99
The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 – 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short (sometimes very short) […]
Valerie Rouzeau “Pas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter“ trans. Susan Wicks; Arc Publications
Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I’d attempted to read […]
L’Empreinte de l’Ange – Mark of an Angel (2008), dir. Safy Nebbou
L’Empreinte de l’Ange is due to be released in the UK on May 22nd this year, but it was shown on 16th March as part of Bradford International Film Festival’s programme of Premieres and Previews. Billed as ‘one of the coming year’s outstanding French dramas’, the film features outstanding performances from Catherine Frot (The Page […]
Mother, Mine (2008), dir. Susan Everett
Mother, Mine is a short film by Leeds-based director Susan Everett. In November, it won the ‘Best Yorkshire Short Award’ as part of the Leeds International Film Festival. Now, it is showing at the Cubby Broccoli Cinema in Bradford as one of six films shortlisted for the Shine Short Film Award (part of the Bradford […]
The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews
The Flying Troutmans is a quest novel in which the narrator, dysfunctional Hattie, takes her dysfunctional niece Thebes, and dysfunctional nephew Logan, on a journey in a van across America in a bid to find their dysfunctional father Cherkis, because their dysfunctional mother Min, has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That’s a lot […]
Yesterday, Jasmin Vardimon Dance Company, Peacock Theatre, London
I don’t like dance performances which require you to read the programme in order to understand what’s going on. I didn’t buy a programme (mostly, to be honest, because the drinks were so expensive at the bar I didn’t have any cash left). So when the lights came up on a girl towering above a sea […]