6th November 2023
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This weekend, Liverpool celebrated its 10th annual Literary Festival, with a myriad of talent spread across three jam-packed days of learning, talks, and book signings. The weekend’s talks included special insights with John Higgs, Juno Dawson and Simon Hughes.
The event opened with author and screenwriter Emma Jane Unsworth in conversation with Dr Danny O’Connor, on Friday night at the University’s Victoria Gallery & Museum, to discuss her fourth novel Slags. Known for her sharp, funny and emotionally honest portrayals of women’s lives, Unsworth captivated the audience with her reflections on growing up, self-perception and the way different relationships unravel.
Her novel, Slags, unfolds through two perspectives of the same woman: one at fifteen, desperate for her future, and one at forty, reflecting on the past. Unsworth explains that the younger perspective was inspired by her own teenage diaries, which she found in her parents house. To her surprise, she found not just the awkwardness of adolescence, but a voice that was “vulnerable, yet extremely confident”. Her narrative voice in the diaries inspired her to write the younger perspective, which she wrote almost ten years ago! “I didn’t want this to be a YA novel, I knew it had something more”, she stated when asked about her reasoning for sitting on this perspective for so long.
The event combined lively conversation with moments of quiet reflection. To begin the talk, Unsworth read an excerpt from the modern-day timeline of the novel, in which the protagonist is in the middle of a motorhome trip through the Scottish Highlands with her sister. The passage perfectly captured Unsworth’s talent for balancing humor and melancholy, with the protagonist’s internal dialogue being extremely humorous, but littered with anxious, spiralling thoughts of kidnapping and death. The reading drew the audience into the novel’s world, and allowed the audience to become more familiar with Unsworth’s writing.
Unsworth filled the novel with her own personal anecdotes from throughout her life. She told the audience that the route that the sisters took in the novel, was in fact one of the routes that she takes in the Scottish Highlands when she is travelling! Also, the younger protagonist’s friend in the novel is obsessed with boybands. Leading Unsworth to share with the audience the hilarious anecdote about her obsession with Take That, and more specifically, Mark Owen. “It was incredible how unstoppable we were!”: Unsworth declared after sharing a story about waiting outside of Mark Owen’s house every night for weeks with a group of local girls in her area.
What resonated most, personally, was the idea that Slags looks at intense relationships, specifically the intense relationship between sisters. Unsworth beautifully said that sisters are meant to be rivals, but when it is most important, they are the one person that you can trust. Her manner in which she spoke about the sisterly relationship throughout the novel, allowed the audience to reflect on their own turbulent relationships with their sisters, creating a more comfortable, relatable environment.
The atmosphere was both relaxed and electric. Unsworth’s natural humour and wit kept the conversation afloat, even as she tackled serious questions about womanhood, grief and reconciliation, in her own words: “humour presents my dark mind”. Her rapport with the audience was warm and unguarded, laughter as well as recognition filled the room through the hour.
Unsworth’s talk captured the essence of the Liverpool Literary Festival: intelligent, heartfelt and personal conversations that celebrate writing as both art and survival. Slags promises to continue her tradition of bold, heartfelt storytelling, and after hearing her talk, it’s difficult to not want to read it immediately.
To read the rest of our Liverpool Literary Festival reviews please click here:
https://www.liverpoolguildstudentmedia.co.uk/category/arts-culture/
