Clare Wigfall
Jonathan Trigell
Triumphant homecoming for Manchester alumni
The Centre's first Literature Live event of 2008 was something of a homecoming for fiction-writers Jonathan Trigell and Clare Wigfall. Both studied at The University of Manchester as undergraduates, with Jonathan also completing his MA in Creative Writing here and setting the novel he drafted on the course in the city.Both writers have since gone on to great things, with said novel, Boy A, recently adapted into an acclaimed Channel 4 film and selected as one of the top ten 'books to talk about' in a World Book Day poll (please visit www.worldbookday.com/spreadtheword/books/book_top-ten.asp to vote!). Clare Wigfall's first book, the short story collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing, was published last year and also highly praised by the critics, so it was a pleasure to welcome the pair back to the University to talk about their successes.
Jonathan Trigell began by reading from the opening of his new novel Cham, which follows protagonist Itchy as he navigates the extreme sports slopes of Chamonix Mont Blanc in France (the writer's current home). The novel contrasts Itchy's hedonistic, adrenaline-fuelled lifestyle with those of the Romantic poets Byron and Bysshe Shelley, who had their own seasons in the sun in the resort two centuries ago.
A second passage, set during the mid-February Paris holidays known as 'black week', compared London and the English with the Parisian alternative, before gathering pace to describe a frenetic ski sequence.
Jonathan then changed tempo again by reading a complete short story recently written for Radio 3. Called Aperitifs with Mr Hemingway, the story takes the form of a letter from an elderly war veteran, Daily Mail reader and fan of the afore-mentioned author.
Following the death of his beloved wife the narrator is considering 'doing a Hemingway', and arranges to buy a gun from a pair of youths on his declining housing estate. When they refuse to exchange it for his cash, however, he finds himself shooting one of them - and that the constant looking over his shoulder and media-scouring this necessitates gives him a whole new lease of life!
Jonathan closed with a short reading from the opening of Boy A, before Clare and her suspense-filled short stories took the stage. 'When the Wasps Drowned' was written shortly after she left Manchester, and describes the summer when two young sisters discover a woman's body buried under their neighbour's top-soil.
With the macabre pragmatism of youth the younger simply removes and starts wearing an appealing ring from the hand she has uncovered, only for the older to commandeer it and take charge of the body's re-burial. As the story closes neither has reported their find, although it is beginning to make its presence felt in their thoughts and dreams.
Clare's second story, 'The Numbers', was written and read in the Scots dialect of its 27-year-old narrator Peigi. Still living on her tiny native island in the Outer Hebrides, she has all but given up on the idea of meeting a man until a former school-mate comes back into her life to transport the island's women to the annual herring gutting.
Tension is introduced as Peigi considers the island's 'boggarts' which may be lurking during her dark journey home after the gutting, but the strange cries she hears echoing through the fog turn out to come from a much more worldly creature.
After an animated Q & A session with the audience both writers joined the crowds in the Martin Harris Centre's foyer, to sign copies of their books and enjoy a glass of wine. The Centre's next visitors will be Hanif Kureishi on 6 March (sold out) and Helen Dunmore and August Kleinzahler on 10 March (a few tickets remaining), followed by the Centre's co-director John McAuliffe and fellow Manchester-based poet Matt Welton on 7 April.
For further details please visit www.manchester.ac.uk/arts/newwriting/events/LiteratureLive/eventsDB/, call 0161 275 8951 or email boxoffice@manchester.ac.uk.