Literary Fiction
Mark Kavanagh
Lyrical fiction that makes poetry out of ordinary places.
Born in Oldham in 1953, Mark Kavanagh was educated at the University of Manchester where he took his BA in 1974 and his MA in 1976. He holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham where he also taught from 1980 until 2013.
Mark is a frequent guest at literary festivals and has contributed to arts programmes on both radio and television, often in discussions about the contemporary novel.
He is a keen supporter of Oldham Athletic Football Club and can also be seen at Brands Hatch and Silverstone. Amongst his recreations he lists travel, the theatre and the opera, as well as travelling with his wife, with whom he shares seven children and ten grandchildren. He lives in Hove and in Western Crete.
The Books
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In a small city park at the edge of an ordinary street, people walk and sit and talk and do not talk. A widower learns the distances he can walk without remembering too much. A couple return to the same patch of grass and circle the same unsaid thing. A woman with a phone sits on a bench and does not speak. A man from somewhere else practises a sentence he may never say. Dogs slip their leads and are gathered back in. Children fall and stand and run again. Over the course of a single day, as light shifts and the ground gives slightly underfoot, their paths cross and almost cross, their lives brushing against one another without quite touching. Nothing remarkable happens, and yet everything that matters takes place in how they move around each other, what they notice, and what they choose not to say.