Saturday, 4 August 2018 at 6:00 pm – Saturday, 4 August 2018 at 8:30 pm
Twisted Tales of Hybridity
Celebrating the sixth year of the Gothic Manchester Festival, Twisted Tales of Hybridity will bring together three authors who have all appeared in previous years; Rosie Garland (Vixen and The Night Brother); Helen Marshall (Hair Side, Flesh Side and Gifts for the One Who Comes After) and Laura Mauro (Naming the Bones) to explore how hybridity informs their work. The event will feature a reading from each author, a panel discussion, and Q&A. It will be followed by a signing session.
Rosie Garland is a novelist, poet and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. She also performs as The Time-Travelling Suffragette and as alter-ego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen. With a passion for language nurtured by public libraries, her award-winning poems have appeared in Bare Fiction, New Welsh Review, Rialto and elsewhere. Her latest poetry collection is As In Judy (Flapjack Press). Debut novel, The Palace of Curiosities, was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and the Polari First Book Prize and Vixen was a Green Carnation Prize nominee. Her latest novel The Night Brother (Borough Press) is out now. She won the Inaugural Mslexia Novel Competition and The Times has described her writing as ‘a delight: playful and exuberant.’ http://www.rosiegarland.com/
Helen Marshall is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She is also the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy there. Her creative writing aims to bring the past into conversation with the present. After receiving a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, which won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, emerged from this work as a book historian. Rather than taking the long view of history, her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds where ‘love is as liable to cut as to cradle, childhood is a supernatural minefield, and death is “the slow undoing of beautiful things”’ (Quill&Quire, starred review). It won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. Her first novel The Migration will be released in 2019.
Mild-mannered laboratory technician by day, Laura Mauro was born in south east London and currently lives in Essex under extreme duress. Her work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees and a variety of anthologies. Her debut novella Naming the Bones was published in 2017. She is currently studying towards a Master's in Modern and Contemporary Literature, which mostly involves pretending to have read James Joyce's Ulysses. In her spare time, she collects tattoos, dyes her hair strange colours, and blogs sporadically at www.lauramauro.com
Tickets are available here.