Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester UNESCO City of Literature are delighted to invite you to interviews with Peter Bakowski and Jake Goldwasser as the Virtual Writers in Residence for the second Festival of Libraries.

Hosted by Manchester writer extraordinaire afshan d’souza lodhi we will hear from Jake and Peter as they embark on their residencies for the Festival of Libraries 2022, hosted by Manchester City of Literature, Manchester Literature Festival, Chetham’s Library and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Hear more about their work, why they’re excited to be working with Manchester City of Literature and more in these two sessions. Taking place on Instagram Live, you can join us on instagram by following @mcrcityoflit.

We will be interviewing Jake from Iowa City of Literature at 7pm UK time on Wednesday 6th July, and Peter at 10am UK time on the 11th July. Do join us and get your questions at the ready! Note that the interviews will be visible on our Instagram feed after the event.

About our guests:

afshan d’souza-lodhi was born in Dubai and bred in Manchester. She is a writer of scripts and poetry and was recently commissioned to write and direct a short film for Channel 4 (An Act of Terror) and a radio play for BBC Sounds (Chop Chop). afshan is currently a Sky Writes writer-in-residence for Rotherham, a partnership between Sky Studios and New Writing North. She is also currently developing a TV series with Sky Studios. afshan has edited many anthologies and has an essay featured in Picador’s collection by Muslim women called Its Not About The Burqa. Her debut poetry collection ‘re:desire’ (Burning Eye Books) has been longlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2021).

Peter Bakowski is a poet and library lover based in Melbourne City of Literature. He has been writing poetry for 40 years and has published many collections including the forthcoming Our Ways on Earth, Waldo’s Game and On Luck Street. His poems have been translated into many languages and he prides himself on writing clear, accessible poems, using ordinary words to say extraordinary things. He has been Writer-in-Residence in Rome, Paris, Macau, Suzhou (China), Greenmount (Western Australia), Battery Point (Tasmania) and Broken Hill (New South Wales). An avid music lover, Peter has presented jazz programmes on Melbourne radio stations 3RRR and 3CR and used to run his own influential record shop Exposure Records. He aims to write ‘a series of portrait poems exploring the interplay of words and music, wit and performance’ in the creative and daily lives of Anthony Burgess and other Manchester creatives.

Jake Goldwasser is a poet, translator and cartoonist based in Iowa City of Literature. His writing has appeared in The New England Review, Lit Hub, Grist, and elsewhere. His mission is to make more people love poetry, and he gets to work towards that mission every day as a teacher of literature at the University of Iowa, where he is pursuing his MFA in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is interested in exploring how the wisdom of the past is relevant to issues of the present, like technology, climate change, and globalization. The practice of translation is central to that interest and to his writing. Jake translates from Dutch, and his translation of Judith Herzberg’s Landscape is forthcoming (Circumference Books 2022). When he’s not writing or reading, Jake is a cartoonist for The New Yorker and other publications.