Main Event

Eileen Myles

  • 25
  • Jan

2017

Wednesday

7.00pm

Image of front cover of Eileen Myles' new book


Manchester Literature Festival are thrilled to present a rare UK event with cult American writer Eileen Myles. Championed by authors Olivia Laing, Dennis Cooper and Lena Dunham, Myles has published more than 20 volumes of radical poetry, fiction, plays and arts journalism. Spanning four decades, I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, captures the daily wonder of a poet’s life with raw intimacy and freewheeling spirit. Writer Maggie Nelson describes Myles’s work as ‘kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary and timeless. For those of you who are encountering it for the first time, I envy your ride.’

Recently published for the first time in the UK, Myles’s seminal, autobiographical novel, Chelsea Girls, is a brilliant and bittersweet account of a young, queer writer surviving her volatile adolescence and discovering sex, drugs, alcohol and love in 1970s and 80s New York. Described as ‘a riotous, unmatched classic and an act of social justice, Chelsea Girls is also essential reading for LGBTQ+ communities everywhere.

Join us for this special event where Myles will read and discuss writing and the pleasures of being a muse for groundbreaking TV series Transparent, with MLF host Kate Feld.