The big guns are out in force at this year’s Manchester Literature Festival. David Mitchell, Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Howard Jacobson, Sebastian Barry and Colm Toibin are just a few from the literary firmament with a new novel to promote. But it is the less obvious creative explorations that take the eye. If… pairs the Manchester Camerata with the Coral’s former lead guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones (pictured) to perform ‘cinematic songs’ he has composed, inspired by Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (Manchester Cathedral, Thu 9 Oct). Also in the Cathedral (Thu 16 Oct), this year’s Manchester Sermon comes from Audrey ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ Niffenegger. Elsewhere Peter Blake, godfather of Pop Art, pays homage to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (Martin Harris Centre, Sat 11 Oct), while over at Contact there’s contemporary bard Kate Tempest (pictured, Sat 18 Oct), just nominated for the Mercury Prize for her album, Everybody Down. She has also been named as one of 2014’s Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Society, who gave her the Ted Hughes poetry prize in 2013 for Brand New Ancients, a narrative work set in modern London over tuba, violin, drums, electronics. Manchester’s own rising literary star Emma Unsworth (author of Animals) returns in the company of fellow fiction writers Anneliese Mackintosh and Zoe Pilger, with Karima Francis providing the music, for Canongate Lates (International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Fri 10 Oct).
Mon 6 – Sun 19 Oct, Various venues and prices, www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk
Photo: Matt Thomas
- Words:
- Neil Sowerby
- Published on:
- Sun 5 Oct 2014
