Literature Live: Beth Underdown and Kate Hamer at Martin Harris Centre

Introduced by Jeanette Winterson, acclaimed author and Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester, this Literature Live event will see writers Beth Underdown and Kate Hamer read from and discuss their new novels, both out this spring.

Listed as one to watch in The Observer‘s New Faces of Fiction 2017 feature, Beth Underdown is also on the books of the Centre for New Writing, starting there last year as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, The Witchfinder’s Sister, is based on the witch-hunts orchestrated by Matthew Hopkins in seventeenth-century Essex, and is out in the UK and US with Penguin Random House. Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train, has described the book as “vivid and terrifying”.

Beth will officially launch The Witchfinder’s Sister on Friday 10 March at Waterstones Deansgate. That event starts at 6.30pm, costs £3 (redeemable against a copy of the book), and will include a reading, Q&A and book signing. More here. She will also be appearing at Verbose at Fallow Cafe on Monday 27 March (7.30pm, free), reading alongside Centre for New Writing colleagues past and present Susan Barker and Grace McAllen, and a selection of open mic performers. More here.

Back to the Literature Live event… Kate Hamer grew up in Pembrokeshire and has recently been awarded a Literature Wales bursary. Her bestselling novel The Girl in the Red Coat was a number-three Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for – take a deep breath – the Costa First Book Award, the Bookseller Industry Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, the John Creasey New Blood Dagger and Wales Book of the Year. Her second novel The Doll Funeral is published by Faber & Faber.