Biography & True Stories
May 2018
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Trusted Partner
Business, Economics & LawJanuary 2024Welcome to the club
The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ
by DJ Paulette, Annie Macmanus
In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of a thirty-year music career, with help from some famous friends. One of the Haçienda's first female DJs, Paulette has scaled the heights of the music industry, playing to crowds of thousands all around the world, and descended to the lows of being unceremoniously benched by COVID-19, with no chance of furlough and little support from the government. Here she tells her story, offering a remarkable view of the music industry from a Black woman's perspective. Behind the core values of peace, love, unity and respect, dance music is a world of exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. But, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space bursting at the seams with powerful women. Part personal account, part call to arms, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while seeking to do justice to the often invisible women who keep the beat going.
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Trusted Partner
Business, Economics & LawJanuary 2024Welcome to the club
The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ
by DJ Paulette, Annie Macmanus
In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of a thirty-year music career, with help from some famous friends. One of the Haçienda's first female DJs, Paulette has scaled the heights of the music industry, playing to crowds of thousands all around the world, and descended to the lows of being unceremoniously benched by COVID-19, with no chance of furlough and little support from the government. Here she tells her story, offering a remarkable view of the music industry from a Black woman's perspective. Behind the core values of peace, love, unity and respect, dance music is a world of exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. But, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space bursting at the seams with powerful women. Part personal account, part call to arms, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while seeking to do justice to the often invisible women who keep the beat going.
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Trusted Partner
Biography & True StoriesMarch 2022Body Work
The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
by Melissa Febos,
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and writing guide, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the challenges it presents. How do we write about the relationships that have formed us? How do we describe our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean to have your writing, or living, dismissed as "navel-gazing"-or else hailed as "so brave, so raw"? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? Drawing on her journey from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor-via addiction and recovery, sex work and academia-Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas-and occasional notes of caution-to anyone who has ever hoped to see their true self reflecting back from the open page.
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Trusted Partner
Biography & True StoriesMarch 2022Body Work
The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
by Melissa Febos,
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and writing guide, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the challenges it presents. How do we write about the relationships that have formed us? How do we describe our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean to have your writing, or living, dismissed as "navel-gazing"-or else hailed as "so brave, so raw"? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? Drawing on her journey from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor-via addiction and recovery, sex work and academia-Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas-and occasional notes of caution-to anyone who has ever hoped to see their true self reflecting back from the open page.
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Trusted Partner
Biography & True StoriesMarch 2022Body Work
The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
by Melissa Febos,
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and writing guide, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the challenges it presents. How do we write about the relationships that have formed us? How do we describe our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean to have your writing, or living, dismissed as "navel-gazing"-or else hailed as "so brave, so raw"? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? Drawing on her journey from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor-via addiction and recovery, sex work and academia-Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas-and occasional notes of caution-to anyone who has ever hoped to see their true self reflecting back from the open page.
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Trusted Partner
Business, Economics & LawJanuary 2024Welcome to the club
The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ
by DJ Paulette
In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of a thirty-year music career, with help from some famous friends. One of the Haçienda's first female DJs, Paulette has scaled the heights of the music industry, playing to crowds of thousands all around the world, and descended to the lows of being unceremoniously benched by COVID-19, with no chance of furlough and little support from the government. Here she tells her story, offering a remarkable view of the music industry from a Black woman's perspective. Behind the core values of peace, love, unity and respect, dance music is a world of exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. But, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space bursting at the seams with powerful women. Part personal account, part call to arms, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while seeking to do justice to the often invisible women who keep the beat going.
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Trusted Partner
Business, Economics & LawApril 2025Welcome to the club
The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ
by DJ Paulette, Annie Macmanus
Featuring a foreword from Annie Mac An inspiring memoir-manifesto from one of the UK's leading DJs. In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of her thirty-year music career, with insights from some famous friends. As one of the Haçienda's pioneering female DJs, Paulette has reached the pinnacle of the music industry, performing for crowds of thousands worldwide. She offers a remarkable perspective from a Black woman's viewpoint, arguing that despite dance music's core values of peace, love, unity and respect, it remains a world rife with exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. Yet, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space teeming with powerful women. Part personal memoir, part call to action, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while honouring the often invisible women who keep the rhythm alive.
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Trusted Partner
Lifestyle, Sport & LeisureMarch 2025Between the salt and the ash
A journey into the soul of Northumbria
by Jake Morris-Campbell
A poet's quest to understand the deep past and uncertain future of his homeland. After inheriting his great-grandfather's Davy lamp, poet Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage across his homeland. Travelling from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, he asks what new ways might be made through the old north. This region, a hub of early Christian Britain and later strongly defined by industry and class, now faces an uncertain future. But it remains a unique and starkly beautiful part of the country, with a deep history that is intimately entwined with the idea of Englishness. Jake's journey along the 'Camino of the North' sees him explore the shifting nature of individual and regional identity across thirteen-hundred years of social change. At the same time, it challenges him to reconsider his own trade of writer and how it relates to the lives of the people he meets along the way. Between the salt and the ash asks what stories the North East can tell about itself in the wake of Christianity and coal. Rejecting the damaging trope of 'left behind' communities, Jake uncovers neglected seams of culture and history, while offering a heartfelt celebration of the place he calls hyem.
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Trusted Partner
Teaching, Language & ReferenceOctober 2025Into being
The radical craft of memoir and its power to transform
by Lily Dunn
The acclaimed author of Sins of My Father shares the secrets of writing a new, transformative kind of memoir. Into being is an essential guide to writing memoir in a radical and empowering way. Drawing on her experience as a memoirist and a teacher of creative writing, Lily Dunn presents the ground-breaking idea that the craft of memoir itself can offer a form of transformation. Dunn demystifies the memoirist's art, helping readers to find meaning in raw experience and elevate the personal to the universal. She considers intriguing questions, from why our memories give greater significance to certain events to how we can write honestly without intruding too far into the lives of our loved ones. She also explores how writers are extending the memoir form to create something hybrid, playful and subversive. In an age of social media, filled with confessions, re-inventions and distortions of the self, the question of what it means to be an individual is more urgent than ever. Into being shows readers how to turn writing memoir into a journey of discovery - one that can be shared with the whole world.
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Trusted Partner
Biography & True StoriesApril 2026Manchester must dance
A life of music, madness and moving on up
by Mike Pickering, Paul Morley
From Manchester's backstreets to global dancefloors - the untold story of a musical pioneer. Beginning on the night in November 1963 when his mum took him to see the Beatles live at Manchester's ABC Cinema, Mike Pickering takes the reader through sixty years of clubs, clothes, gigs, record labels, football matches and politics. Pickering has lived through decades of rapid change in popular music. As an influential DJ he introduced house music into the legendary Haçienda. He signed Happy Mondays and James to Factory Records before working with Kasabian, Gossip and Calvin Harris at Sony. His Mercury Prize-winning, multi-million-selling group M People transformed the music industry's attitude to dance music. As he tells his remarkable story he introduces an array of friends and collaborators, many of whom would become important - and sometimes notorious - figures in music history. Manchester must dance is a revelatory insider's account that moves from the cramped back streets of 1950s north Manchester on a journey deep into music, the city and the wider world. It features forewords from some of those Pickering inspired: Martin Fry, Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher and Calvin Harris.
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Trusted Partner
Lifestyle, Sport & LeisureMay 2026Between the salt and the ash
A journey into the soul of Northumbria
by Jake Morris-Campbell
A writer's quest to understand the deep past and uncertain future of his homeland. After inheriting the miner's safety lamp that belonged to his great-grandfather, Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage across his homeland. Travelling from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, he asks what new ways might be made through the old north. This region, a hub of early Christian Britain and later strongly defined by industry and class, now faces an uncertain future. But it remains a unique and starkly beautiful part of the country, with a deep history that is intimately entwined with the idea of Englishness. Jake's journey along the 'Camino of the North' sees him explore the shifting nature of individual and regional identity across thirteen-hundred years of social change. At the same time, it challenges him to reconsider his own calling as a writer and how it relates to the lives of the people he meets along the way. Between the salt and the ash asks what stories the North East can tell about itself in the wake of Christianity and coal. Rejecting the damaging trope of 'left behind' communities, Jake uncovers neglected seams of culture and history, while offering a heartfelt celebration of the place he calls hyem.
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Trusted Partner
Biography & True StoriesJuly 2026Q is for garden
Tending the histories of queer cultivation
by Jenny Chamarette
A bold, tender exploration of how queerness and nature entwine - and what happens when we step beyond the binaries that fence us in. There is a Q in garden, but you can't always see it. When Jenny Chamarette faced a devastating health crisis, they found themselves unmoored from the rules of gender, sexuality and productivity. In a small South London garden, Jenny began to imagine another way of living: porous, unruly, rooted in the lessons of soil and plant life. Gardens, like identities, are usually bounded - but what if those limits can be re-drawn? Blending memoir and cultural criticism, this book asks whether the categories we inherit - colonial, patriarchal, conventions of sexuality and gender - still serve us, or whether they confine us. From illness and recovery to queer love and ecological wonder, Q is for garden invites readers to reimagine how we inhabit land, culture and each other. An eloquent work of nature writing and queer thought, Q is for garden digs into the rich history of queer gardeners, botanists, artists and agriculturalists. It offers a hopeful vision of belonging, if we are curious enough to unearth it.
