Manchester Metropolitan University, in partnership with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

This symposium, which will be attended by the author herself, intends to explore the ‘Barkeresque’ mode, which assimilates influences from Dickens, Wodehouse, Kafka and Beckett all rolled into one. Topics for exploration encompass Englishness and place; community and utopia; the Gothic and the sacred; comedy and trauma; and experimental narration, including the exhaustion and exuberant revival of the novel genre.

Full details at http://www2.mmu.ac.uk/artshumanities/rah/the-novels-of-nicola-barker-symposium/