He is best known for the award-winning novel Junk, which dealt with teenage heroin use at a time when Trainspotting was hitting the headlines, and for his novelisation of the film Billy Elliot. Kill All Enemies tells the story of a 14-year-old caught in violent family life.
This will be a discussion with a difference. Melvin Burgess will join Manchester Salon in picking apart fashions in literature and to what extent novels reflect and shape our impressions of society.
We will examine the process of writing gritty, realistic novels and how important the process of being immersed in the subject can be for developing stories.
Date: Tuesday 6th September
Time: 6.30pm - 8.30pm
Venue: Blackwell's bookshop, Manchester
Tickets: £5 (£3 conc) available from the shop or from Manchester Salon
Just finished reading 'Kill All Enemies' and loved it. A slighly slow start whilst you position yourself in the heads of the main characters, but soon has you gripped with the escalating pace events develop at. Most delightfully though is the way the personalities of the characters broaden out as they respond to the the events they rather accidentally cause.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the thing I liked about the novel and Melvin's writing is the way he allowed the people who are young at the centre of the novel to develop and change in a fluid way. This style contrasts with the categorisation of 'Young People' used to shoe horn people, who are young, into a relatively fixed group to deliver policy through. The world isn't like that and the more categories are used to box people in, the more skewed and alienated their characters will become.
Melvin's new novel, helped inspire me to write a review of the 'Young People' category that is very lazily used today - see http://www.manchestersalon.org.uk/problem-with-young-people.html. Looking forward to discussing these issues and the importance of writing with Melvin on Tuesday 06 September.
Thanks for this, Simon. Can I use this text in the main bit of the blog?
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