The Manchester Literature Festival 4-20 October 2024

In recent years I try to attend some of the events during the Manchester Literature Festival and this year is no exception. This year the three events fell over two days 19th and 20th October at Home this last weekend. Below are the events I attended.

Earth Prayers

Quite a quirky combination but enjoyable and listening to Carol Ann Duffy reading from Earth Prayers and her own poetry was incredible and immensely enjoyable. Alongside Carol Ann Duffy John Sampson did a wonderful reading, played a variety of wind instruments and pieces to accompany the readings.

Professor Carol Ann Duffy DBE (Manchester Metropolitan University) | Carol Ann Duffy (Poetry Foundation) | Carol Ann Duffy (Study Smarter) | Carol Ann Duffy (GradeSaver)

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is most famous for her poetry, becoming England’s first female, first Scottish, and first LGBTQ Poet Laureate between 2009 and 2019. She is Professor and Creative Director of Manchester Metropolitan University writing school.

Earth Prayers: Encounters in Poetry with the Natural World

Publisher: Picador (24 Oct. 2024) | 167pp

The wonders of nature have inspired poets for centuries, stretching far back beyond the Romantics. Beautifully curated by Carol Ann Duffy, the poems in Earth Prayers span widely across time, but in their moments of joy, empathy or difference, even the earliest poems reveal a concern for the welfare of our planet. Duffy brings these early eco-poems into conversation with contemporary voices writing into the environmental crisis, and through this dialogue sounds a clarion call to cherish and defend the planet while we can.

From John Clare to Lucille Clifton to Kathleen Jamie, the poets collected in Earth Prayers speak at times as stewards and ambassadors of the earth, at others in anger at those who would exploit nature, or to question their own part in its decline. And the earth speaks back: in Stephanie Pruitt’s ‘Mississippi Gardens’ the soil bears witness to the worst of human history, while in ‘Poem’ Jorie Graham relays the earth’s plea: ‘remember me’.

To encounter nature, these poems tell us, is to be humbled, to have our own smallness magnified by the presence of the sublime. Earth Prayers is a testament to the immense beauty of the natural world, and a challenging reminder of our place in ‘the living skein / of which the world is woven’.

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Harriet Walter

A wonderful evening Harriet Walter is eminently listenable, her knowledge and love of Shakespeare shone through the whole event. Wonderful and beautifully spoken readings from She Speaks! With fascinating insights and responses to Kate Popperwell’s questions. Thoroughly enjoyed it and the book is a must have.

Harriet Walter biography: IDBm | Harriet Walter: My First London Home (By Jane Slade, written for The London Magazine, produced by The Chelsea Magazine Company and published in The Telegraph, 27 February 2024)

She Speaks!: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said

Publisher: ‎Virago (17 Oct. 2024) | 226pp

New parts for thirty of Shakespeare’s women, letting them speak their minds, written by famed stage and screen actress, Dame Harriet Walter DBE

With new parts for thirty Shakespearean women, written in ‘Shakespearean’ verse and prose, Harriet Walter goes between the lines of the plays to let us hear what she imagines – sometimes playfully and sometimes searchingly – these women were really thinking.

Here’s what Gertrude longed to say; why Lady MacBeth felt she should be King; how Juliet’s nurse bemoaned her loss; why Ariel is anxious about freedom and what Cleopatra’s handmaidens really thought of her. Ophelia surprises us, Olivia surprises herself and Miranda glimpses the future; these pieces are alongside other brilliant insights, from the servants to the sovereigns.

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An Audience with Elif Shafak

It was an absolute pleasure to sit and listen to Elif Shafak talking to Katie Popperwell. I had been looking forward to this since it was announced in the programme and it did not disappoint. The book There are Rivers in the Sky sounds amazing – the depth and breadth of research phenomenal – and this book is one that I look forward to reading. What a wonderful evening it was.

Website: Elif Shafak | X/Twitter @Elif_Safak | Instagram @shafakelif | Substack: Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist. She has published 19 books, 12 of which are novels. She is a bestselling author in many countries around the world and her work has been translated into 55 languages.

Elif Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow. She also holds a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College. She is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She is a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). An advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of expression, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and three times TED Global speaker. Shafak contributes to major publications around the world and she was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people “who will give you a much needed lift of the heart”.

There are Rivers in the Sky 

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (08.08.2024) | Page Count: 496 

“Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water.

In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy sit of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.

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Buy: Elif Shafak