MMU’s Dr. Xavier Aldana Reyes with the Gothic TV panel:Dr. Linnie Blake, Dr. Catherine Spooner and Dr. Stacey Abbott Words by Neil Harrison  If, as Alfred Hitchcock once claimed, ‘T.V. has brought murder back into the home where it belongs’, then over the years our appetite for the dark side of the small screen has…

 Words by Sophie Bannister As a child, I read a lot of Malorie Blackman books, so I was unbelievably excited to find she was holding an event as part of the Manchester Literature Festival. In preparation, I got out my (rather old) copy of Noughts and Crosses to take along with the hopes of getting…

Adam O’Riordan Words and Pictures by Siobhan O’Toole As I entered the foyer of The Midland Hotel, I instantly felt transported to 1900s Manchester. The grandeur and beauty of my surroundings seemed like the perfect setting for the day’s intimate and special reading from the hotel’s writer-in-residence, and lecturer of poetry at Manchester Writing School,…

Words by Sophie Bannister. Warning: Manchester Metropolitan University’s Geoffrey Manton building is infected. Do not enter under any circumstances. Zombies walk among us.  I walked into MMU’s Geoffrey Manton building to be confronted by zombies riding the lifts, limping across the atrium, and creepily sniffing those of us who dared  to stay for Professor Fred Botting’s lecture, Zombie (?). Thankfully, the zombies didn’t follow us into the lecture theatre, so we took a…