This Digital event will be available for tickets holders to watch from 1pm on Monday 1 November until midnight on Sunday 14 November on the MLF Vimeo channel.

Two brilliant young novelists discuss their sensational debuts. In Caleb Azumah Nelson’s beautifully lyrical Open Water two young Black talented Londoners – he a photographer, she a dancer – fall in love to a soundtrack of the city and some exceptional music. In Brandon Taylor’s precise and absorbing Real Life Wallace, a Black gay biochemistry student at a Midwestern university, tries to come to terms with the death of his father in Alabama. Both novels consider male vulnerability, trauma, grief, love and tenderness and question where writing by and about Black men fits in a canon of predominantly white literature.

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British-Ghanaian writer and photographer. He was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2020. Open Water was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. Brandon Taylor is an American writer and the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. Real Life was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 and is being made into a film produced by and starring Kid Cudi. Brandon is also the author of the short story collection, Filthy Animals.

Presented in partnership with Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester and hosted by Ellah P. Wakatama.