CityLife

Muriel Spark celebrated at Central Library

Dame Muriel Spark

MANCHESTER Central Library is to welcome old friends Carcanet Press from 1pm on Friday, January 29 to celebrate the remarkable life of one of the twentieth century’s best-loved novelists, Muriel Spark.

Following the recent publication of Martin Stannard’s widely acclaimed ‘Muriel Spark: The Biography’, Carcanet has reissued Spark's autobiography, Curriculum Vitae.

The narrative, which is as brilliant and witty as any of her novels, begins with Spark's childhood and schooldays in Edinburgh (taught by the original ‘Miss Jean Brodie’) and ends in the late 1950s with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957.

‘In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,’ Spark says. With a characteristic lightness of touch, Spark describes the key episodes of her life: her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, life in wartime London, working at the Foreign Office as one of the ‘girls of slender means’, editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism. Curriculum Vitae traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged.

Spark’s biographer, Professor Martin Stannard from the University of Leicester, and Dr Andrew Biswell, an expert on twentieth-century fiction and literary biography from MMU, will be there to discuss Spark’s life and work and the subject of literary biography.

This event will be held from 1-2pm in the Committee Room at Manchester Central Library, St Peter’s Square, on January 29, 2010. This is a free event and all are welcome.