Dance Move by Wendy Erskine book launch at Blackwell’s
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
At Wendy Erskine’s Manchester book launch for her latest short story collection Dance Move, you get value for money as she has invited a special panel of guests to read alongside her and discuss her second collection with host David Gaffney.
Sweet Home, her first collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Wendy will be joined by Graham Caveney, who will be reading from his forthcoming book On Agoraphobia, an entertaining and moving mix of memoir and cultural history of agoraphobia, its history and its appearances in literature and art, author and host of First Graft podcast, Heidi James, who will be reading from her latest critically acclaimed novel The Sound Mirror, and writer and journalist Adelle Stripe, who will be reading an extract from Ten Thousand Apologies, her music biography inspired by the strange life and curious times of notorious UK band Fat White Family. David Gaffney – whose third novel Out Of The Dark has just come out with Manchester indie Confingo Publishing – will chair the event and field questions from the audience.
Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published by Repeater, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Faber & Faber, Tangerine Press, No Alibis Press and Rough Trade Books, in The Stinging Fly and on BBC Radio 4. Sweet Home, her first collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. It was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and won the 2020 Butler Literary Award.
Here’s what hosts Blackwell’s say about the book: “Meet Drew Lord Haig, called upon to sing the obscure hit from his youth at a paramilitary event. Or Max, who recalls an eventful journey to a Christian film festival. Meet Mrs Dallesandro, in the tanning salon on her wedding anniversary dreaming of a teenage sexual experience. And Sonya, who scours the streets of Belfast for the missing posters of her dead son. In Dance Move, the new collection of stories from Wendy Erskine, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by the moment in their past that marked them. In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far you can end up from where you came from, and what it means to look back.”
