The Love to Read programme is run by the wonderful staff at Manchester Metropolitan University Library. Love to Read encourages “reading for pleasure”: it showcases the Library service’s excellent reading material that might not necessarily be connected to student’s academic studies. As part of Love to Read the Library runs meet the author events.

As part of the inaugural Manchester Libraries Festival, we are delighted to be able to invite both students and members of the public to this special meet the author event with the award-winning poet Andrew McMillan. After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan’s new book, Pandemonium, marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world.

Andrew McMillan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His debut collection physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize.