In collaboration with the Czech Centre and Literature Across Frontiers, we are delighted to welcome Jachym Topol, accompanied by his musician brother Filip. Topol's fourth novel Gargling with Tar, set during the crushing of the Prague spring of his boyhood, has been described as a Czech Tin Drum. Jáchym Topol's family was part of Prague’s altenative scene. His father was regarded alongside Václav Havel as one of the most important dramatists in Czechoslovakia and his younger brother Filip became a well-known rock musician while still a teenager. Jachym’s novels have been translated into many languages and he has been described by Boyd Tonkin as “the Martin Amis-cum-Irvine Welsh of the post-1989 transition”.

 

Jonathan Schofield, author of the City Life Guide to Manchester and editor of Manchester Confidential, gives a lively lecture on one of the city’s greatest literary icons, Anthony Burgess. Best known for A Clockwork Orange, Burgess authored thirty novels as well as many critical works and musical compositions. Discover how Manchester shaped the man and his fiction. Delivered with Jonathan’s famous wit and zeal, there will be no snoring at the back of this class. The event will take place, appropriately, in the new International Anthony Burgess Foundation.