Got back a couple of days ago from a week away near  Manchester, which  happened to coincide with the Manchester Literature Festival. There was a fair bit I’d have loved to have seen, but one I certainly couldn’t miss was the Northern Salt reading with my fellow Salt authors Elizabeth Baines, Robert Graham, Mark Illis and John Siddique at the Whitworth Art Gallery.

It was an excellent reading from four very different writers.  I’d have loved more poetry, but the prose writing was fine work indeed and Elizabeth in particular read with such a sense of rhythm. A good number of poets could learn from a reading like that, I tell you.

It was also a fantastic chance to meet a bunch of other Salteenies, not least the readers, of course but also one of the Salt dynamos Jen Hamliton-Emery; Tony Williams, whose first poetry collection is just out from Salt (in fact , Tony got his first sight of book that afternoon); and Steven Waling. Tony’s blog of the afternoon is here. There are photos of the reading and subsequent coffee over at Elizabeth’s blog.

Jen took some video of me blethering briefly about The Ambulance Box and also flimed the readings. I think she probably took some footage with Tony too, so watch out for all this appearing soon on the Salt blog!