The next event in our Rewriting the North series, which celebrates writers and writing connected with the North of England has writers Tabitha Lasley and Jeff Young are in conversation with Dr David Cooper about place, life writing and blurred genres.

Jeff Young is a writer for theatre, radio and screen whose TV credits include Eastenders, CBBC and Casualty. He broadcasts essays for Radio 3, collaborates with artists and musicians on sound art installations and has worked on many arts projects in Liverpool and elsewhere, including a residency in Bill Drummond’s Curfew Tower. His Ghost Town was longlisted for the 2022 Portico Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography prize. He is currently writing his second book for Little Toller, Wild Twin.

Tabitha Lasley was a journalist for 10 years. Her work has been published in the Guardian, Esquire, the London Review of Books, and others. Her first book Sea State was longlisted for the Folio Award and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Portico Prize.

Dr David Cooper is a Senior Lecturer in English and the founding Co-Director (with Rachel Lichtenstein) of the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the relationship between literature and geographical thought. He is co-editor of the forthcoming The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies (London: Routledge)

The 2022 season of Rewriting the North explores themes in the Portico Prize 2022 winning novel, Toto Among the Murderers by Sally J. Morgan, which captures life for young women on the edges of counterculture in 1970s Sheffield and Leeds. Themes that are explored in the novel and that will be discussed during the events include the impact of male violence, fiction about the recent past, memoir fused with fiction, writing about the north at a distance, and women’s art.

Rewriting the North is funded by the Arts Council and is curated by the Portico Library in partnership with the Centre for Place Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University.