Manchester Literature Festival 2025

Now in its 20th year, Manchester Literature Festival returns this autumn, running city-wide across a variety of venues in October. If you can’t wait until then, fear not – MLF’s co-directors Cathy Bolton and Sarah-Jane Roberts have been busy pulling together a special programme of spring events.

The festival will bring new writers and more established names to the city, celebrating literature in all its forms. Details of some of the spring programme have been announced (see below), and we’re particularly keen to hear from leading chronicler of nature Robert Macfarlane, discussing his thought-provoking new book, Is a River Alive? at Contact on 9 May (7pm, tickets £14/£12).

Passionate, original and revelatory, Is A River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date. It teems with fascinating ideas, unforgettable characters and stories. Weaving cultural and natural history, reportage, travel and nature writing together, it takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey. At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – and should be recognised as such in both imagination and law. Inspired by the activists, artists and lawmakers of the young ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, Macfarlane takes the reader on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept.

Through three key waterways – the Río Los Cedros (the ‘River of the Cedars’); the wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of Chennai, and the Mutehekau Shipu, which runs from the wild interior of Nitassinan to the Gulf of St Lawrence, all places where rivers are believed to be alive – Macfarlane asks, ‘What is the river saying?’ The answers provide new ways of thinking about the water, how we ensure its survival and, ultimately, how rivers offer us hope for the future.

Robert Macfarlane is the international bestselling writer of Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as the book-length prose-poem Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He co-created The Lost Words and The Lost Spells with artist Jackie Morris, and they are currently completing a third book The Lost Birds.

This event is hosted by Helen Mort, award-winning poet, novelist and fellow nature lover.

Presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester, novelist Kevin Barry will be reading from his latest novel The Heart in Winter – described by Anne Enright as ‘an absolute belter of a book’ and Jon McGregor as ‘a glorious and haunted yarn’ on Thursday 1 May (7pm, Central Library, tickets £10/£8); Laura Bates will be discussing, with Helen Mort, her urgent and timely The New Age of Sexism – exploring the dark side of AI, misogyny, chatbots, deep fakes and the metaverse – on Tuesday 13 May (7pm, Central Library, tickets £10/£8); Colm Tóibín will be back in Manchester introducing his latest novel Long Island on Monday 16 June (7pm, Central Library, tickets £12/£10), while well-respected US-based crime writer and scriptwriter Attica Locke will be here on a rare visit to the UK on Wednesday 16 July (7pm, Central Library, tickets £10/£8), to talk about Guide Me Home, the latest of her gripping, politically charged crime novels, which explores the tensions, xenophobia and inequality running through America.