Melvyn Bragg, Joanne Harris, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Rosen, Sarah Hall, Robert Harris, Tracey Thorne and Paul Mason are some of the star names as this year’s Manchester Literature festival gets underway this week.
Melvyn Bragg and Robert Harris explore power, politics and humanity through the lens of history, whilst Margaret Atwood and Sarah Hall present disturbing visions of the future in their new novels.
Paul Mason discusses what a post-capitalist world might look like and, in the Festival’s new Literature and Landscape strand, writers reflect on our relationship with nature, the earth and climate change.
Elif Shafak delivers this year’s Gaeia Manchester Sermon and Joanne Harris presents a specially commissioned Writer’s manifesto.
Words and music are brought together through some unique collaborations with manchester jazz festival and Manchester Camerata, and singer songwriter Kathryn Williams performs songs from her new album Hypoxia inspired by Sylvia Plath.
In much anticipated literary re-imaginings, Anthony Horowitz introduces his new James Bond novel Trigger Mortis and Jeanette Winterson launches her retelling of Shakespeare’s A Winters’ Tale, The Gap of Time.
The legacy of literary icons Saul Bellow, John le Carré, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and WB Yeats is explored and pioneering women Eleanor Marx, Sophia Duleep Singh and Virginia Woolf are championed.
The Festival’s ever popular literary tours explore the haunts of Manchester’s literati, and grant access to the world revealed on the pages of much loved novels Love on the Dole and Wuthering Heights.
The Festival has tripled in size from 2006 when it featured 30 events attracting an audience of 3,000 to the 2014 Festival which featured 80 events and attracted an audience of 10,000.
For details of events goto the Festival Website
