GUY MANKOWSKI

I'm very excited that at Dance City, Newcastle this evening my second novel is being released. The launch will coincide with a performance of a scene from the book choreographed by Dora Frankel, featuring the Argentinian ballet dancer Laila Sanz (talking with me above during the development of the performance). In case that is a little too far afield, below are some of the advance quotes for the novel which I hope will entice you to buy it-   ‘It’s unusual to find a young male writer who can write with such sensitivity and maturity. Guy Mankowski’s portrayal of the ballerina Yelena is wholly convincing, taking us inside her thoughts and feelings as she describes the course of her life, from harrowing childhood to professional success, punctuated with turbulent emotional crisis. This is clearly a writer of great talent.’  Andrew Crumey, Booker Prize longlisted author. Guy Mankowski’s second novel, Letters from Yelena, is a fantastic literary achievemen...

  On Saturday there was great newspaper coverage surrounding the fact that Victoria Pendleton, one of Britain’s most successful athletes, had revealed a history of self-harm. In a new memoir she describes how she cut herself with a pair of nail scissors, even on the night after she had won her first cycling Gold at the Beijing Olympics. In so doing I feel she has shed a strong light on the way our culture views mental illness. There is increasing acknowledgement of the fact that mental health issues carry with them a stigma. This story had such an impact because Pendleton is ‘a high achiever’, and this disclosure therefore flies in the face of many prejudices about mental illness. The prevailing view seems to still be that some people are ‘mentally well’ and the rest ‘suffer mental illness’, though this binary understanding flies in the face of mental health research, which indicates that mental health problems exist on a spectrum. I noticed one tweet from a sports feed...

Having lived in cities for many years, their uncompromising presence has loomed large in my writing. I’m conscious of the literary precedent of using the modern city as character, and it is one which is preoccupying me more and more recently. In London Fields, Martin Amis depicted London’s many layers- its grimy yet labyrinthine quality. In ‘How The Dead Live’ Will Self brilliantly captured the sense of absence in cities, what Milan Kundera called the sense that ‘life is elsewhere’, when he described a world in which the dead go to live in a suburb in Crouch End. Perhaps more evocatively for a fan of the 1930’s such as me, in The New York Trilogy Paul Auster used the genre of detective fiction as a metaphor for his characters existential unease and urban alienation. In the three narratives men were ostracized from the rat race while they undertook mysterious tasks for unknown benefactors. Auster’s characters were therefore placed in a position whereby they could dispassio...

I'm excited to announce that Dance City Newcastle are to host the launch party for my second novel ‘Letters from Yelena’ on 1st October 2012. Part of the launch party will be a specially commissioned performance, directed by the acclaimed North East choreographer Dora Frankel, in which scenes from the book will be performed to a composed soundtrack. It promises to be an innovative night of literature, music and dancing set at one of the North's most exciting and original venues. Tickets go on sale at Dance City’s box office soon. In the meantime I’m looking forward to seeing how the piece and its music both develop over the next few months. This is interesting new ground for me! For publicity or further information please contact lucyboguslawski@legend-paperbooks.co.uk Portrait photography by Tony Griffiths for Dora Frankel Dance- http://www.dorafrankeldance.co.uk/ Dance City is online at http://www.dancecity.c...

I’ve been fortunate this week to be given a kind advance notice for ‘Letters From Yelena’ from the exceptional Hanna Jameson, author and aspiring ballerina. Her debut novel Something You Are is published in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands in December (a copy of its exquisite Dutch cover is below). 'I finished Letters from Yelena in two sittings. The mental and physical strain of the professional ballet artist is almost tangible. Mankowski creates a bleak and isolated landscape, where aspiration and ambition can be crushed under the sheer weight of their own internal pressure. 'Yelena' has more emotional and intellectual depth in a chapter than the entirety of The Black Swan. Instead it harks back to something like the visual masterpiece of The Red Shoes; romantic, dark, uncompromising, and beautiful. I defy any woman, and any dancer, to not see parts of themselves in Yelena. Exceptionally talented. Thank God you don't write crime/thrillers or I'd be bitter an...

I'm delighted to see that I've just reached 1,000 followers on Twitter. As a small thank you here is a new short story entitled The Sequin Underworld... I wish she would pull David out of her ears. Bowie’s ‘Velvet Goldmine’ is filtering incessantly from her earphones, and I wonder if anyone will ever hang onto my words as desperately as she does to his. That’s the first thought I remember having this evening; and I must recount them precisely if they are to be of any use. I remember first seeing her leant against a pillar in this greater London train station, her dove-white skin a violent contrast to her blood-red lips. She was a beguiling blur of sequin, lipstick and perfume, and as her face moved into the light I saw that her tiny shoulders were dusted with some gold glitter. She’s still there now, wearing a red sequin dress, wrapped in a trench coat of indiscriminate dark colour. Her uneasiness suggests that her mind is consumed with something of pressing importance. She...

A quote from the Editors there, but I think it's fitting. I've just had a journalistic piece, entitled ‘The Dark Side Of The Human Psyche’ published in the Gothic Issue of New Trespass Magazine, coined as ‘an opportunity to delve delightfully into the dark side.’ Other contributors include Collin Kelly, Izzy White and Sarah Reilly. In the past it has featured contributions from Paloma Faith, Salena Godden and Simon Munnery. Below is a snippet of my article. The magazine is available at- www.exacteditions.com/newtrespass As a child I was deeply intrigued by the way Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales combined magical images with delicately drawn portraits of pain, refined and astute enough to be recognisable in our own lives. It seems that when beauty is coupled with pain, it makes for a particularly potent combination. Readers, languishing in the real world, accept that there is a price for pleasure, even beauty, and so the lows we experience with our protagonists al...