Novel Voices with Meng Jin and JA Mensah online

Novel Voices is a brand-new five-part online series featuring Ellah P Wakatama in conversation with ten debut authors who are helping to shape 2021’s literary landscape. Taking place between February and April 2021, the first event takes place on 22 February with novelists Meng Jin and JA Mensah.

Writers in the series will be paired together based on thematic similarities in their work and for each event they are invited to explore the influences, experiences and structures that helped in the shaping of their narrative tone, voices and approach.

Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and Editor-at-Large at Cannongate Books, Ellah P Wakatama was also the force behind The Complete Works series of events at HOME in late 2019 and early 2020, when she interviewed the likes of Scots Makar Jackie Kay and Man Booker-longlisted author Kamila Shamsie.

Her guests in the first Novel Voices event are Meng Jin, the author of Little Gods (just out with HarperCollins) – which expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past – and JA Mensah, the author of Castles From Cobwebs, a compelling exploration of memory, race, mothers and the fractured self, out on 18 February with local indie Saraband.

The writers will discuss their craft and the journey to shaping their first, published full body of work. Pulled from both corporate and independent publishing houses, writers in the series will be paired together based on thematic similarities in their work and for each event they are invited to explore the influences, experiences and structures that helped in the shaping of their narrative tone, voices and approach. These works will span genres as the series seeks to explore a range of narratives that reflect the new voices hitting bookshelves in 2021.

This event is presented in partnership with Creative Manchester and the Centre for New Writing, in association with Blackwell’s Bookshop.