Literature Live: Nat Ogle, Gurnaik Johal and Saba Sams at Burgess Foundation

The Literature Live programme from the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing is back in full swing, this time welcoming graduates Nat Ogle, Gurnaik Johal and Saba Sams reading from their work and chatting to author, lecturer and literary editor Luke Brown.

Saba Sams’ debut collection of short stories Send Nudes was published by Bloomsbury earlier this year, and described by the Guardian as “rare and uplifting”.

Darlington-born Nat Ogle came to Manchester to study, and left with a Bachelors, a Masters and a PhD from the Centre for New Writing, and now works as a bookseller in London. His “original and provocative” debut novel In The Seeing Hands Of Others is published by Serpent’s Tail in 2022 and tells the story of a contentious trial, pieced together in documents from the accused and accuser.

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London and works in children’s publishing. He was shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize in 2018 and graduated from the University of Manchester in 2019. His story collection We Move, centred around the Indian diaspora in West London, will be published by Serpent’s Tail in April 2022.

Saba Sams is a fiction writer based in London. Her stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine, and she was shortlisted for The White Review Short Story Prize in 2019. Saba Sams’ debut collection of short stories Send Nudes was published by Bloomsbury earlier this year, and described by the Guardian as “rare and uplifting”. Madeleine Feeny described it as “acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future”.

Luke Brown is a lecturer in creative writing at the Centre for New Writing and the author of the novels My Biggest Lie (2014) and Theft (2020). Having worked as a commissioning editor, for the prizewinning small press Tindal Street Press, and later as deputy editor of Granta magazine, Luke still works as an editor on a freelance basis for a variety of literary imprints, and reviews books for the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman.

Taking place in real life at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, this event’s ticket price includes discounts at the bookstall run by Blackwell’s bookshop.