Manchester Literature Festival presents... Raifa Rafiq, Salma El-Wardany, Yassmin Midhat Abdel-Magied & Afshan D’souza Lodhi In 2016, former Prime Minster, David Cameron, said he considered Muslim women to be traditionally submissive. Frustrated by constantly being told what Muslim women were like, It’s Not About the Burqa anthology editor Mariam Khan wanted Muslim women to voice […]
Manchester Literature Festival presents... Exceptional times call for exceptional writers. Scottish Makar, poet, and novelist Jackie Kay introduces her selection of ten of the most exciting BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic people) writers working in the UK today. Experience incredible writing, and find out why Jackie feels these are the writers who are influencing […]
Manchester Literature Festival presents... Queens of Tartan Noir, Val McDermid and Denise Mina, join us to discuss their brilliant new novels. In How the Dead Speak, Val brings Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan together again when the remains of a killer, who’s supposedly alive and in prison, are found on a construction site. […]
Manchester Libraries, Libraries Connected and Penguin Books invite you to join us for a special Friday evening with the hugely popular author Lesley Pearse. Lesley Pearse was told as a child that she had too much imagination for her own good. When she grew up she worked her way through a number of jobs, including […]
Celebrate #LibrariesWeek with Manchester Libraries and acclaimed author Sarah Butler. Sarah is a writer and literature activist who lives in Manchester. She has three novels published by Picador in the UK: Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love, Before The Fire and Jack and Bet which was published in early 2020. In 2007, Sarah established the […]
Join Henry Normal as he chats and shares poems with award-winning wordsmiths from Flapjack Press. With audience Q&A. A series of live stream events, 12 - 1pm each Wednesday from 14th July to 1st September. Brought to you by Flapjack Press, Manchester Libraries and New Poetry Society. What better way to spend your lunchtime? Free […]
In ‘All You Need Is Dynamite: Acid, the Angry Brigade, and the End of the Sixties’ - the latest in his Art Decades series of small format books - Dave Haslam explores the fading of Sixties dreams of peace and love, and the emergence of urban terrorist groups, particularly the Angry Brigade who carried out […]
MANCHESTER LITERATURE FESTIVAL ‘How did we get here? Where might we go?’ Is the future ‘a screen onto which we project our fantasies and terrors’? What can the past tell us about the future? Are we all doomed? And what’s gender got to do with it? Jeanette Winterson’s latest book 12 Bytes considers our relationship with […]
MANCHESTER LITERATURE FESTIVAL ‘Later I saw that change came as change always comes, from a chain of events with a long history, too long to see from back to front, till it come.’ In The Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey’s Costa Book of the Year winner, the life of David, one of the island’s […]
MANCHESTER LITERATURE FESTIVAL A fig tree with a tale to tell; a grieving teenage girl who wants to know her family’s story; two sets of lovers hiding from society. In her enchanting new novel, The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak considers how the story of humans and the natural world are entwined. Set in London […]
MANCHESTER LITERATURE FESTIVAL Much-loved former Labour MP Alan Johnson makes a welcome return to MLF. Following his series of successful memoirs – This Boy, In My Life, The Long and Winding Road and Please, Mr Postman, Alan has turned to fiction, joining us to discuss his thrilling debut novel The Late Train to Gypsy Hill. Featuring a Ukranian waitress mixed up in […]
MANCHESTER LITERATURE FESTIVAL Celebrating a landmark new series curated by Booker Prize winning writer Bernardine Evaristo, Black Britain Writing Back re-introduces lost or hard-to-find books by Black writers who wrote about Black Britain and the diaspora across the Twentieth Century. Joining Bernardine is Jacqueline Roy whose novel The Fat Lady Sings tells the stories of Gloria and […]
25 Jun 2026
Music Q&A: ‘It’s Time the Tale Were Told – A People’s History of the Smiths’
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From dedicated performance spaces to stairwells, screens, nooks and domes, Central Library might directly inspire your next event or intervention. Contact us to arrange a tour.
