Frances Leviston and Kirsty Logan at Martin Harris Centre

Literature Live: Frances Leviston and Kirsty Logan at Martin Harris Centre for Music & Drama, Manchester, 23 March 2020, free entry - Find Out More

Prose meets poetry at the latest Literature Live event presented in partnership with Creative Manchester. The reading series from the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester has been running for going on for 15 years, since October 2005 when it was launched by Louis de Bernieres. Since then the line-up has ranged from Neil Gaiman to Hilary Mantel, back on 19 April, talking to Kamila Shamsie at the RNCM.

So to this evening’s event, and the University’s creative writing lecturer and poet Frances Leviston welcomes fellow Scottish writer Kirsty Logan back to town (she was here last year for the Penguin Pride tour). With work touching on the magical realism genre, Logan is the author of two novels, The Gracekeepers (Harvill Secker, 2015) and The Gloaming (Harvill Secker, 2018), three short story collections, A Portable Shelter, The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales and last year’s Things We Say In The Dark – described as “a shocking collection of dark stories, ranging from chilling contemporary fairytales to disturbing supernatural fiction, by a talented writer who has been compared to Angela Carter”. Stylist said it was a “brilliant collection” and The Skinny called Logan “one of the best contemporary horror writers”, while i summed it up with “Logan’s prose shimmers with menace, and her tightly wrought nightmares feel intensely real”.

Stylist said it was a “brilliant collection” and The Skinny called Logan “one of the best contemporary horror writers”

Kirsty, who lives in Glasgow with her wife and their rescue dog, has also published the flash fiction chapbook The Psychology Of Animals Swallowed Alive: Love Stories, plus a short memoir entitled The Old Asylum In The Woods At The Edge Of The Town Where I Grew Up. She judged the flash fiction entries for last year’s acclaimed Bridport Prize and her own books have won a LAMBDA Literary Award, Polari First Book Prize, Saboteur Award, Scott Prize and the Gavin Wallace Fellowship, and have been selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club. As well as short fiction, her poetry has been recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

She’ll be reading extracts of her work and chatting to Frances Leviston, also originally from Scotland, and who herself has branched out, in her case from poetry to prose. As well as being the author of two collections of poetry – Public Dream, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and Disinformation, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize – she was shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award in 2015, and this event coincides with the launch of her first collection of stories, The Voice In My Ear, due out with Cape on 19 March.