Dear blog,

We’re in the middle of the Manchester Literature Festival here at the moment (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/) and I’ve already seen some wonderful authors. Michael Frayn (author of the brilliant play Copenhagen about the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) and Claire Tomalin (who has just published a biography of Dickens) were really great, engaging and funny and thought-provoking. I also really enjoyed an event yesterday with Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin and Indian author Kishwar Desai. They both write about serious cultural and political issues but with very different approaches in their books, Tender Hooks and Witness the Night, respectively. I very much enjoyed the Manchester Camerata’s performance on Friday night, with an interlude of poetry written by Michael Symmons-Roberts specially commissioned for the event.  There’s exciting stuff still to come too – poetry by Sean O’Brien and John McAuliffe tonight, Antonia Fraser on Harold Pinter on Wednesday and David Lodge on Friday.

I also had a lovely time listening to Dave Haslem’s ‘in conversation with’ Jarvis Cocker last night, which was nothing to do with the Literature Festival but instead part of another festival, the Manchester Weekender (http://www.creativetourist.com/the-manchester-weekender-2011). It didn’t seem as though there were hundreds of us sitting in a huge (and very beautiful) room in the Town Hall; somehow the event was really quite intimate and Jarvis’s responses seemed genuine and thoughtful. He mentioned the changes to University funding twice and it’s clearly something he feels strongly about. He speaks about it again in the Guardian’s G2 this morning.

Since my last blog post we had a north-west long nineteenth-century seminar, at the John Rylands library, which was very well attended. Sue Chaplin (Leeds Met University) gave an excellent paper on Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas  and Julie-Marie Strange (Manchester Uni) gave an equally excellent paper on father’s chair in working-class family homes in the nineteenth century.

I have a busy week this week, made even busier by a trip to London on Tuesday for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association awards ceremony, this year to be held at the Royal College of Pathologists. These are always wonderful events though that I would hate to miss, where the poetry prize winners read their poems and the essay prize is awarded by the Chairperson-judge, who this year is Penelope Lively.

More soon,

Sharon