Manchester Literature Festival 2024

Now in its 19th year, Manchester Literature Festival returns this autumn, running city-wide across a variety of venues from 4 to 20 October.

Revealing a programme of events designed to inspire, move and challenge, MLF’s co-directors Cathy Bolton and Sarah-Jane Roberts said: “Reimagining is at the heart of this year’s Manchester Literature Festival.”

The festival will bring new writers and more established names to the city, celebrating literature in all its forms, with events planned at Central Library, Martin Harris Centre (University of Manchester), John Rylands Library on Deansgate, Manchester Poetry Library (Man Met), HOME and Contact.

MLF has been building on its previous success expanding audiences and creating new partnerships across the national and international literary world, and this year the festival presents a series of creative writing workshops where some of the UK’s most acclaimed writers share insights into their craft. There is also a special programme aimed at children and families featuring inspiring authors, brilliant illustrators and acclaimed performers bringing books to life through immersive stories, crafts, drama and music.

We’re – as always – really excited about the annual Rylands Poetry Reading, this year delivered by the former National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke (10 October 7pm, free but booking recommended, John Rylands Library), and presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester. Gillian has won the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry Award and is a recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and she’ll be reading from her “sublime” new collection The Silence, her tenth with Manchester-based Carcanet Press.

Also on the poetry tip, we’re looking forward to hearing award-winning Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk read from her “stunning” debut collection in English, Still City (Carcanet), which charts the Russian invasion of her homeland. She’ll be discussing it with Charlotte Shevchenko Knight (whose Food for the Dead, Cape, is on the Forward Prize list this year). Presented in partnership with Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University, this is on 17 October at 7pm (free but booking recommended).

For prose, we reckon Daisy Johnson and Andrew Michael Hurley (18 October 6.30pm, £10/8, Central Library) is one for your watchlist – the two masters of folk horror will discuss their chilling, atmospheric new books (The Hotel and Barrowbeck respectively), both set in a single location over a significant period of time. Daisy is the youngest-ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under, and she is the author of Fen and Sisters. Andrew is the author of three novels – The Loney won the Costa Best First Novel Award and the Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, Devil’s Day won the Encore Award and Starve Acre, which is soon to be released as a film starring Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark.

One of the finest writers of our age, Alan Hollinghurst launches his first novel in seven years, and will be chatting about the “dark, compelling and wickedly funny” Our Evenings with poet and novelist Andrew McMillan (7 October 7pm, £12/10, Central Library, sponsored by The Midland Manchester).

It would be remiss of us to not mention The Book of Manchester, with a special launch (12 October 7pm, £12/10, Contact). Edited by poet Lemn Sissay and Comma Press editor David Sue, the collection explores the transformation of the city from post-war, post-industrial decline to the aspirational ‘Manctopia’. The readers and special guests include novelist Okechukwu Nzelu, whose debut The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney won a Betty Trask Award and whose last novel, Here Again Now, was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award, the Polari Prize and the Diverse Books Awards.