Manchester Literature Festival 2024

Manchester Literature Festival runs from 4 to 20 October and presents inspiring live literature and spoken word from international writers and home-grown talent.

Every year, Manchester Literature Festival presents inspiring live literature and spoken word from across the globe and, for the 19th edition, you can be sure that there will be plenty in the programme to pick your way through. From Contact and HOME to Central Library and Manchester Poetry Library, MLF runs in venues around the UNESCO City of Literature, often in partnership with Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, Creative Manchester and other local agencies. The MLF organisers say: “We believe literature and culture have the power to connect us, entertain us, challenge us and show us new ways of looking at and navigating the world.”

For prose, think the likes of recent guests Zadie Smith, Kate Mosse, Jeanette Winterson and Deborah Levy. For poetry, perhaps Lemn Sissay, Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, and pioneering reggae poet, performer and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson. For cultural figures, journalists and people from the political sphere, maybe Jeremy Deller, Thurston Moore and George Monbiot.

Last year’s highlights included a performance by Max Porter (Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, which won several prizes and was adapted for the stage in a critically acclaimed solo performance by Cillian Murphy, and Lanny, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize) of a dramatic abridged reading of his novel Shy alongside a live electronic score by musician Roly Porter. Commissions are always worth getting tickets for. In 2023, Jason Allen-Paisant performed for the first time a trio of new poems commissioned by Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester Art Gallery, and chatted about the fascinating process of making them with the inimitable Malika Booker; Jason’s collection of interlocking poems Self-Portrait As Othello was published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press and picked up a Forward Prize in 2023. Another special event to keep an eye out for is the annual Rylands Poetry Reading, presented every year by Carcanet – in 2023, it marked a special 50th jubilee celebration of PN Review magazine, and featured readings by Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Sasha Dugdale and Will Harris.

Also have those peelers peeled for “fringe” happenings popping up around and about, including the CT Literature Desk’s favourites Peter Barlow’s Cigarette and Poets & Players, this at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.