Our annual collaboration with Manchester Literature Festival at the Whitworth Art Gallery, 2.30-4.00. Everyone welcome, this event is free, but booking advisable to avoid disappointment: http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/events/rebecca-goss-jamie-mckendrick-li-lu-38915

Jamie McKendrick

Jamie McKendrick is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a Poetry Book Society Choice; Ink Stone (2003), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Out There (2012) won the Hawthornden Prize.

His most recent collection is Anomaly (2018). An earlier selection of his poems was published as Sky Nails (2000), and he is editor of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004). The Embrace (2009), his translations of Valerio Magrelli’s poetry, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the John Florio prizes, and his translations of Antonella Anedda’s poems, Archipelago (2014), also won the John Florio prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. McKendrick’s translation of Giorgio Bassani’s masterwork The Novel of Ferrara is published by Penguin/Norton in 2018.

Rebecca Goss

Photograph credit: Lucy Carter

Rebecca Goss is the author of three full-length poetry collections, The Anatomy of Structures (Flambard, 2010) and Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013). Her Birth was shortlisted for The 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, The 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing and The Portico Prize for Literature 2015.  Carousel, her collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge was published in 2018 with Guillemot Press. Her third full-length collection, Girl, (Carcanet/Northern House, 2019) has recently been shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards.

Li Lu

” The epitome of international, cool, young and elegant, Li Lu plays with a passion that
takes flight both sonically and visually” – Sky Arts

Originally from China, Li Lu describes herself as ‘a cellist with wings’, ‘an artist with a bow’ and ‘an adventurer with a cello’. Classically trained to the highest level, as a soloist and orchestra musician, she has performed across Asia and Europe. Her artistic life took a new direction when she accepted a challenge to travel across Europe, in thirty five days, from Athens to Edinburgh, surviving purely by playing cello. Her performances were featured in a Sky Arts documentary Art of Survival (2011), reaching a vast audience in the UK and
internationally.

The experience of engaging an audience through playing in unexpected scenarios and
settings, and with food, shelter and transport depending on how well she was received,
brought a new maturity, power, and immediacy to her performances. Inspired by her
adventure she recorded the complete Bach cello suites, named In love with Bach (2012).

Li Lu’s adventure made her want to connect more with a non classical audience, especially
children, and it reawakened a long-held fascination with design and the visual arts. This
has led her away from a standard musical career into teaching and into a number of
unconventional musical collaborations. In addition to her exciting performing career, Li Lu works with Chetham’s School of Music, where she enjoys teaching young music talents