Ian McGuire

Ian McGuire grew up near Hull and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Virginia, USA. He is co-founder and co-director of the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing. His stories have been published in the Chicago Review, Paris Review and elsewhere. His first novel was the contemporary campus satire Incredible Bodies.

This event is the launch of his second novel The North Water, an historical novel set amidst the nineteenth-century arctic whaling industry. The North Water has been described by Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel as ‘Brilliant. A fast-paced, gripping story set in a world where 'why?' is not a question and murder happens on a whim; but where a faint ray of grace and hope lights up the landscape of salt and blood and ice. A tour de force of narrative tension and a masterful reconstruction of a lost world'.