An Evening with MMU Writers at International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Not content with running a multi-award winning live literature night at The Castle every month, Bad Language recently popped up at Elizabeth Gaskell’s house during Manchester After Hours, and now they’ve joined forces with researcher collective Feminisms in Public. The result is An Evening with MMU Writers, featuring ten writers from Manchester Metropolitan University, each responding creatively to the theme of gender and sexuality.
One of those taking to the stage is our very own Exhibitions Editor Polly Checkland Harding, who has had short stories published in Confingo, Lighthouse and The Manchester Anthology. Short story writer and novelist Nicholas Royle is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, runs Nightjar Press and is as an editor for Salt Publishing. In the prose corner, they are joined by Sue Fox, author of transgressive novel The Visceral Tear, and Michael Stewart, who won The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize with his debut novel King Crow.
Representing the poets are Kim Moore, whose collection If We Could Speak Like Wolves was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012; Bridport Prize-winning Mark Pajak, and Zaffar Kunial, who has a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust.
Natalie Burdett’s poems have been published with Ink, Sweat & Tears and Under the Radar, and she has been shortlisted for the London Magazine and Bridport prizes; Rachel Davies has been a winner in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition and is on the organising committee of regular live lit event Poets & Players, and Hilary Robinson has had work published by The Interpreter’s House, Avis, Obsessed by Pipework, Morning Star and Beautiful Dragons Press.
Ten writers, all for free – the event is currently full up, but get your name on the Eventbrite wait list sharpish and you might well be in with the chance of getting your mitts on a return!
