Armistead Maupin at Aviva Studios
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
It’s your chance to catch one of the most influential writers of the last century as Armistead Maupin heads out on the road for a UK tour to celebrate the long-awaited tenth novel in the Tales of the City series, and pops back into Manchester. OMG, we’re super excited!
Bestselling, much-loved author and LGBT activist Armistead Maupin has been blazing a trail through US popular culture since the Seventies, when what became his iconic and groundbreaking Tales Of The City series of books began life as a popular newspaper column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The first novel in the series was published in 1978 and a steady flow of new titles released through the Eighties – and picked up again in the Noughties – has been taking the literary world by storm ever since. For the sake of full documentation, the original series comprises: Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980), Further Tales of the City (1982), Babycakes (1984), Significant Others (1987) and Sure of You (1989).
Maupin returned to the characters in 2007’s Michael Tolliver Lives and eventually gave up pretending it wasn’t a sequel; since then adding title number eight Mary Ann In Autumn (2010), number nine The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014) and now Mona of the Manor, scheduled for publication on 7 March.
A TV miniseries from the Nineties reprised by Netflix in 2019, starring Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis and Elliot Page, helped to garner new audiences, and Maupin has even managed to fit in a few other books – non-Tales novels Maybe The Moon and The Night Listener, and, most recently, the memoir Logical Family (2017). “From the beginning, I resolved to create a tapestry large enough to encompass all of humanity”, is a quote from America’s ultimate storyteller.
A charming and engaging raconteur, Armistead Maupin has plenty to fill “An Evening With…”, chatting to a special guest host about his favourites tales from the past four decades and offering his own engaging observations on society and the world we inhabit. Grab yourself a Mai Tai and pull up a chair…
