SLICE OF LIFE: Karolina Ramqvist & Katie Goh in conversation

We are thrilled to welcome Karolina Ramqvist and Katie Goh to the shop to discuss their memoirs, which both beautifully explore their history and experiences through food. Karolina and Katie will be in conversation with Ruby Martin.

Doors: 6.30pm, starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £4. Admission is free when purchasing a copy of either book.

About BREAD & MILK:

In Bread and Milk, Karolina Ramqvist traces a girlhood through food - she recalls the bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting outside her mother's bedroom, and delighting in the luxury of that extra knob of butter on her grandmother's rice pudding.

In the thin spread of low-fat margarine on her mother's bread, and the pancakes on the counter each time she will be left alone for the night, the young Karolina learns that food connects the women in her life as much as it reveals the chasms between them. When she finds herself a single parent to a daughter of her own, food becomes the way for her to show her love, but also instils a complicated inheritance.

Bread and Milk is a brazenly intelligent - and mouth-wateringly delicious - reflection on love, motherhood and family from one of Sweden's most notable literary stylists.

About FOREIGN FRUIT:

The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked in supermarket displays, is not the same orange that grew from the first straggling orange grove that took root on the Tibetan plateau, part pomelo and part mandarin. The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, it has been a harbinger of God and doom, fortune and failure, pleasure and suffering. It is a fruit containing metaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables and histories within its tough rind. So, what happens when the fruit is peeled and each segment - each moment of history, each meaning in time - is pulled apart?

In this distinct, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation - and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds.

About the authors:

Karolina Ramqvist is one of the most influential writers and feminists of her generation in Sweden. She has written five novels and is widely celebrated for her powerful explorations of contemporary issues such as sexuality, commercialisation, isolation and belonging. In 2015, Karolina was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize for The White City (Den vita staden), and for her ‘unique and strong position in Swedish literature’. She is the author of Bear Woman, published in 2023.

Katie Goh is a writer and editor. Her award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in publications includingPort, the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, i-D, Dazed and gal-dem, and she is an editor for Extra Teeth literary magazine. Her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer’s Choice for The Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022. She grew up in the north of Ireland and lives in Edinburgh.

Part of Stories From Sweden, supported by the Swedish Arts Council in collaboration with the Swedish Embassy, UK.

If you cannot make the event but would like a dedicated copy of one of the books, please email events.manchester@blackwell.co.uk or call us on 0161 274 3331.

Our event format is usually a 45 minute discussion between the author and interviewer, followed by a chance for audience members to ask questions. There will be the opportunity to get your book signed/dedicated after the event. Events are a brilliant opportunity to discover new books, meet authors and likeminded readers and learn something new.

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