The Caroline Chisholm Reading: Sara Collins at Burgess Foundation
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Hosted at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation by the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, this annual event honours the memory of writer Caroline Chisholm, who was a valued member of the CNW community. Caroline graduated from the Creative Writing Masters programme in 2013 and also studied for a PhD at the Centre for New Writing, developing the early drafts of her novel Swimming Pool Hill while there. Longlisted for the Mslexia first novel award, it won the Bridport Prize’s inaugural Peggy Chapman-Andrews first novel award in 2014.
This event features a reading by a writer whose fiction is close in spirit to Caroline’s own novels in progress and her work at Greenpeace – in 2016, it was Hisham Matar, in 2017 Rachel Seiffert read, and last year saw Ross Raisin.
This year, the event welcomes Sara Collins, author of The Confessions Of Frannie Langton, which novelist and playwright Emma Donoghue has described as: “By turns lush, gritty, wry, gothic and compulsive.”
This year, the event welcomes Sara Collins, author of The Confessions Of Frannie Langton, which novelist and playwright Emma Donoghue has described as: “By turns lush, gritty, wry, gothic and compulsive.” Of Jamaican descent, Sara worked as a lawyer for 17 years in Cayman, before admitting that what she really wanted to do was write novels, going on to study Creative Writing at Cambridge University, where she won the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for ‘Recreative’ Literature.
Here, she also began to write a book inspired by the idea of “writing a Gothic novel where the heroine looked like me”. This turned into her first novel, which came out on Penguin in March. Back to Emma Donoghue: “The Confessions Of Frannie Langton is a dazzling page turner. With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together the slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story and crime novel to make something new.”
Alongside Sara will be readings by graduates of the Centre for New Writing.
