What’s on at the Portico Library
The Portico is home to an eclectic range of fantastic public events, from talks and performances to exhibitions, awards and workshops.
The Portico is home to an eclectic range of fantastic public events, from talks and performances to exhibitions, awards and workshops.
1 February - 8 June 2024
The Portico Library is delighted to announce that Iris Yau 丘靜雯 FRSA FHEA (University of the Arts London) is curating an exhibition on British trade (including trade wars) with China in the nineteenth century. The exhibition will showcase some of our key historic books on voyages to China as well as objects illustrating the trade in silk, opium and tea. The exhibition includes loans from Bolton Library and Museum Services and Silk Museum, Macclesfield.
Image courtesy:
Economic Botany Collection; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 71993.
June 2024: Exhibition teaser on the theme of English Folklore
July 2024: ‘Weird As Folk’ exhibition
Check out Abbi’s blog on her research at the Portico Library here
Abbi (BA MA PGCE) is a queer, butch, autistic writer and poet based in Manchester.
My whole life has been a protest. My body has also been a battleground and dingy back room. Nevertheless, it's never belonged to me. We have arrived at a time where lesbian- focused spaces have faded like a droplet into water. It is time. Time for us to establish our history, our connections, our own bodies and how radical it always has been for us to simply breathe.
Abbi will be joining the Portico Library as a writer in residence from May onwards, to support their PhD in creative writing. The piece of auto fiction they are working on is titled “Story of Them” and focuses on testimony within queer lineages. Abbi will be queering and challenging the Portico collection via community engagement and a blog documenting creative process.
The story of how the new independent publisher Fox and Windmill Press came into being and the importance of place in identity by co-founder Habiba Desai.
Memoir-writer, novelist, poet, and short-story writer Catherine Simpson reflects on the life story which has led her to publish three books.
First-time published author Zara Sehar reflects on her experience of writing, reading and what it means to rewrite the north.
Arguably, crime writing in the North West begins with Manchester-born Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, which has heavily influenced murder mysteries from the early nineteenth century until the current day.
I don’t remember knowingly reading, either as a child or as a young adult, specifically Northern writing, but for as long as I can remember I was always conscious of being northern, and that this was a Good Thing.
by Myna Trustram
On the train on my way to the library I read a review of Ariel Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (2017). She describes a writing assignment in Mongolia, where alone in a hotel room she miscarried, and held in her hand her five-month foetus son as he died.
By Hope Strickland.
The Caribbean Society in Manchester run a series of holidays spread across the year. Some will be small trips to Blackpool, the Highlands or a stately home. Once or twice a year they travel to a sun-soaked destination abroad: a cruise maybe or a five-star hotel by the beach. My Grandma, Ina, organises these trips from her kitchen in Northenden…
A fantastic guide to everything happening this season at the Portico Library.
Click on the links inside to discover more and use the the navigation bar at the top to view full screen.