THE Manchester Children’s Book Festival is set to return for another lot of literary treats and family fun.
This year’s festival will run from June 26th to July 5th and will be headlined by Matt Brown, author of the Compton Valance series and hugely popular presenter on Nickelodeon UK.
Matt, along with Compton Valance illustrator Lizzie Finlay, will be appearing at the festival family fun day on Saturday, June 27th, as well as hosting a special event at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital and taking part in a very special author event.
And in honour of the mouldy sandwich that allows Compton to time travel, food scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University have placed a cheese and pickle sandwich into an incubator and will be examining the microbes and time-travelling potential over the next 13 weeks, the time it took Compton’s sandwich to develop its magic powers.
Also appearing at the festival will be Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, along with children’s poets Imtiaz Dharker and Mandy Coe. Mandy is leading a festival campaign to get children’s poetry acknowledged by bookshops up and down the land.
Author Liz Kessler will also be launching her latest novel, Read Me Like a Book, at the festival, and Alex Scarrow will be performing excerpts from his Time Riders series of young adult novels.
Carol Ann Duffy, Artstic Director of the Manchester Writing School and Director of the festival, said: “You might not have been expecting to see us again until 2016 but, due to popular demand, the Manchester Children’s Book Festival is back, and now an annual event. We’re really pleased to be able to bring you our 2015 programme, taking place at Manchester Metropolitan University and in our partner venues across the city.
“Our theme for 2015 is time travel, inspired by our headline book series Compton Valance, which sees Compton visit different time periods using his magical mouldy sandwich. Look out for Compton (and his sandwich) at our MMU Family Fun Day and at events in Manchester libraries, museums, galleries and theatres. You can also tell us where (or when) you’d like to visit in our Time Travel Comic Strip Competition.”
Carol Ann continued: “We’re proud to maintain MCBF as an event for everyone, and continue with special projects that enable the broadest possible audience to engage with literature and the arts, and provide opportunities for creative expression. The Festival is a chance to highlight the year-round work of our outreach and schools’ liaison teams in the Humanities faculty at MMU, and we’ll be taking authors, artists and performers into classrooms for MCBF workshops designed to raise aspirations and confidence in young people – and inspire the festival stars of tomorrow!”
Festival Director Kaye Tew said “When my fellow directors, Carol Ann and James Draper from the Manchester Writing School at MMU, and I put together the MCBF programme, we agreed that it should be as accessible as possible. We offer a great deal for family audiences but, by scheduling the festival during the school term and by offering innovative – sometimes quite disgusting – ways to get children to engage with stories and books, we hope to engender an interest in reading for pleasure.”
