The Real Story: In the Half-light at The King’s Arms

What happens in the place between light and dark, where one thing is changing into another? That’s what the 2018 Not Quite Light Weekend aims to show – and tell, in the case of this special one-off evening of twilight tales from The Real Story. Kicking the whole festival off, In the Half-light features five writers and five new commissions inspired by all things crepuscular. The award-winning novelists, short story authors and poets from across the globe are keeping this brand-new work under wraps until the night, so it’s five world premieres in one.

The Real Story is an Arts Council England-funded project that promotes creative non-fiction and the essay in the UK, and is curated by writers Adam Farrer and Kate Feld. Alongside art, photography and performance events over the course of the NQL Weekend (including a Friday-night concert exploring the themes of transition, dawn and dusk, narration by NQL organiser Simon Buckley and readings by the actress Julie Hesmondhalgh), In the Half-light will feature an all-female line-up, from home and away.

Manchester Writing School lecturer and ex-neuroscientist Rachel Genn is the author of the novel The Cure and the creator of the National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, a quasi-institution with output spanning film, writing and installations. One of this year’s two Burgess Fellows at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, Joanna Walsh is the author of several critically acclaimed books including Hotel, Vertigo and Worlds from the Word’s End, and Break.up, a novel in essays, which she recently launched hat Waterstone’s Deansgate.

From further afield, Belfast-born, Edinburgh-based award-winning author, critic and experimental writer Maria Fusco has been described by Artangel as ‘one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary writing in the UK’ and her latest book, a collection of critical writing, is Give Up Art (New Documents). Berlin-based May-Lan Tan’s collection of short stories, Things to Make and Break, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and her recent projects have included illustration, electronica and durational performance art. Co-editor of poetry and art magazine The Pickled Body, Canadian Dimitra Xidous lives in Dublin and is author of the poetry collection Keeping Bees with work forthcoming in gorse editions anthology Under the Influence.

You’d be daft to miss this. Really, you would.