Manchester writer Ian McGuire features at BCNegra in Barcelona

29 January 2025 - News

La Mercè 2025 will have Manchester as its Guest City, displaying a program of music and street arts that will highlight the cultural connection between both cities. To strengthen these ties, and as Barcelona and Manchester collaborate within the UNESCO Creative Cities of Literature Network, during 2025 there will also be a joint literary program that will bring novelists, poets and performers from the English city to the literary festivals organised by the Institute of Culture of Barcelona. Therefore, Manchester will be present at BCNegra, Barcelona Poesia, Món Llibre and Festival 42.

Our first featured writer as part of this exciting international literary partnership is Ian McGuire who will attend the Crime Fiction Writing Festival in February. The festival runs from 10-16th February 2025.

Ian McGuire grew up near Hull and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Virginia. In 2007 he co-founded the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. He is the author of three novels, Incredible Bodies (2006), The North Water (2016) and The Abstainer (2020). The North Water was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, The Historical Writers Association Gold Crown Award, and was named one of the top ten books of 2016 by The New York Times.

Ian’s event is called ‘Don’t Forget to Remember’.

We reflect on memory and the many ways it can be interpreted and manipulated by bringing together three authors who seek the boundaries between real, invented and distorted memories: Helene Flood, Martin Suter and Ian McGuire.

With his latest works, Ian McGuire transports us to bygone eras, masterfully recreating fictional memories and historical plots that come to life through his narrative; Helene Flood addresses psychological manipulation with a case of  gaslighting  that shakes the perception of what is real and what is constructed, and Martin Suter takes us on a search for another’s memories, examining emotional and moral dilemmas.

An immersion in literature that questions the fragility and plasticity of memory, as well as its central role in the construction of our stories and identities. This conversation invites us not to forget, but also to be suspicious of memories.

 

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