Kathryn Simmonds and Jon McGregor

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University of Bolton presents...

Kathryn Simmonds is the author of Sunday at the Skin Launderette (2008). She was one of the supplementary winners in the 2005 Bridport Prize with her story How to Eat an Elephant. She lives in North London, and works as a quiz writer.

Kathryn has had a great deal of success with her poetry over recent years, which led to her winning an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. She was also awarded an Eastern Arts Bursary in 2003. Her pamphlet of poems, Snug, was a winner in the Poetry Business competition. The Handover Notes, a story Kathryn wrote about a secretary, is in the process of being turned into a short film. Kathryn Simmonds is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia.


Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976. He moved with his family to England and spent his childhood in Norwich and Norfolk, later studying at Bradford University for a degree in Media Technology and Production. He started writing seriously during his final year at University, contributing a series entitled 'Cinema 100' to the anthology Five Uneasy Pieces He has had short fiction published by Granta magazine, and a short story entitled While You Were Sleeping broadcast on Radio 4.

He left Bradford for Sheffield, then Nottingham, taking a series of shift-jobs to support his writing, and wrote his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, in Nottingham, while living on a narrowboat. His novel has received much press attention, as he was the youngest contender and only first novelist on the longlist for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. It went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award and to be shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Jon McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways To Begin, was published in 2006 and was on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.

Price: £4.00 / £2.00

Time: 7:30pm