Literature Events in Manchester and the North

Following the cancellation or postponement of activities and festivals due to the ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation, some keen event organisers have launched an online version of Live Literature Land. Verbose were among the first in Manchester, taking the monthly night into the ether at the start of May with Tania Hershman on headline duties and a line-up of open mic acts (a second episode is chalked up for 19 June – more here soon); Punk In Drublic followed suit and Liverpool regulars A Lovely Word and Leeds-based Word Club have been doing something similar.

The format seems to work, with Word Central the latest to hit our living rooms while the libraries remain firmly closed, hosting, first, Gordon Zola and upcoming on 11 June, Shirley May, the force behind the Young Identity collective, recently spotted alongside Tony Walsh on the the United We Stream performance platform with Our City Speaks, which you can now view here. Word Central collaborator Flapjack Press has also been running a night every Monday via Zoom, offering sweet treats in the form of six poets each week, and word on the street is Bad Language will be back soon with an online literary quiz.

The Scots Makar, Jackie Kay, is now offering “a wee bit of company from our living rooms to your living rooms” with, in her words, “an old-fashioned, rich but heady mix of poetry and music” on Thursday nights at 7pm (and available afterwards via YouTube). In Makar To Makar, you’ll find her chatting to another poet every week and inviting songs from one of three resident singers; in the fourth episode, she welcomes along Imtiaz Darker, Chester Literature Festival Guest Director and Artist in Residence. Meanwhile on the airwaves you can listen to the English Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, as he welcomes guests such as Kate Tempest into his garden shed for chats about creativity and inspiration (Wednesdays on BBC Radio 4 and available via the Sounds app).

Carcanet Press, too, has been holding online book launches, so keep an eye out for those (most recently, Evan Jones’s new collection, Later Emperors), while Comma Press has been gifting us its Morphologies Masterclasses, creative writing workshops, podcast episodes and blog posts a-go-go. Commonword have been running free interactive creative writing workshops with Maya Chowdhry and are looking for your Verses Against The Virus, while Manchester Writing School head honcho, and former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy has commissioned poets to respond to the crisis through her WRITE where we are NOW project.

Check out on the new website for Manchester City of Literature, who, in partnership with Commonword, host the first instalment of The Hook, “exploring the work of the late Mancunian poet Diké Omeje, with a stellar panel of Peter Kalu, Shirley May, Mike Garry, Cheryl Martin and Segun Lee-French”. More here. Future topics include Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Burgess.

Festival wise, the third Altrincham Word Fest has been rescheduled to run 20 September until 4 October, while the 15th Manchester Literature Festival is due to take place from Friday 2 to Sunday 18 October 2020: “We are currently working hard on a diverse and exciting programme of fiction, poetry, culture, imaginative writing and events for young readers! We aim to announce a few headline events over the next few months and launch the full Festival programme in August 2020.” The Big Book Weekend still has episodes online, showing events that would have taken place at Liverpool’s WoW Festival, among others, while the Northern Short Story Festival (part of Leeds Big Bookend) celebrated its fifth birthday this year with a Virtual Mini Festival on Saturday 30 May, and has plenty of online resources, such as interviews with Hebden Bridge-based indie Bluenose. This year, we can also travel – virtually, of course – to York Festival Of Ideas.

We’ll try and update the Literature Guide to reflect all the new activity (so do keep us posted if you have anything in the pipeline!), and don’t forget to check out book-buying opportunities direct from the indies and not just Ama*on. There are quite a few offers to take advantage of – whether you’re self-isolating, shielding or simply slowing down a bit, it might be an opportunity to increase your reading repertoire and stock up your home library.

As doors start to reopen in coming months, rest assured the fabulous exhibition all about Manchester’s independent poetry publisher Carcanet will await you at The John Rylands Library while the newest library in town is just around the corner in Spinningfields. There are online talks from “one of the most unusual libraries in the world”, the Working Class Movement Library, a plethora of Polite Literature activities during The Portico Library lockdown and a new From Home page courtesy “the oldest public library in the English speaking world”, Chetham’s Library. And while most of our favourite literary venues can’t have visitors, their websites can – Elizabeth Gaskell’s House is running online reads and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation has a virtual exhibition and other visual and aural goodies to enrich your lockdown experience.

We are so grateful to National Lottery players, The National Lottery, DCMS and Arts Council England for supporting our freelance writers during this crisis. This means that, although venues remain shut and campaigns cancelled, our writers can be reengaged to help arts organisations and artists across the North of England share their online content with our culture-hungry readers.

Don’t forget to Read More: scroll down for our More in Literature stories, check out our Guide To Bookshops In Manchester, and get more tips for trips, as lockdown loosens, with our literary guides to Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Cumbria.

Here are our picks