Sean O'Brien & Jane Rogers

As a poet, Sean O'Brien is one of Britain's most decorated figures: his awards include the TS Eliot Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Northern Rock Foundation Writers Award (2006), and the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection (which he’s won a record three times). Lesser known, as yet, is his short story writing. Tonight, Manchester’s Comma Press launches his eagerly awaited first collection of shorts, The Silence Room – a dark, archly gothic gallery of visions and inventions, proceeding from the vaulted rooms of an otherwise unprepossessing Victorian library.

He will be joined by the novelist Jane Rogers, who will be reading her contribution to Comma’s The New Uncanny, an anthology of shorts specially written to update Freud's famous essay.