Samantha Shannon in Manchester – Event Recap

On Tuesday 16th of April I attended another, yes another, book event at Waterstones Deansgate. I love the fact I get to attend a lot of book events and I am beyond grateful for this and Tuesday was no different. Samantha Shannon, the author of The Priory of the Orange Tree came to Waterstones Deansgate to discuss her new book and many different bookish things! Here is my event recap!

As it seems to be with events that are on a work day I always seem to arrive out of breath and incredibly tired and this event was no different. The event started at 6:30pm and I arrived in Manchester at 6pm thanks to a lot of traffic on the drive from work. This meant I had to speed walk to the event in order to miss nothing. So, I arrived to the event out and breath and wind-swept! I didn’t miss the start of the event though!

This event was chaired by the wonderful Kimi once again and she had prepared a plethora of questions all about The Priory of the Orange Tree as well as a couple of questions about The Bone Season and Samantha’s writing process.

Samantha started out the questions by describing The Priory of the Orange Tree to the audience, which I found really helpful as I hadn’t read the synopsis of the book at all. Samantha described it as a feminist retelling of the story of George and the Dragon!

Samantha also discussed how she went about writing Priory and where it all came about from. I love hearing how authors write their books and the process of the characters and story coming into their heads.

As always at a Samantha Shannon event the wonderful ‘Strong-female-character’ speech was made. I am so glad that Kimi asked Samantha about this as I actually missed a lot of this speech when she made it at NYA Lit Fest. This speech is incredibly empowering and it certainly made me leave the event feeling empowered. If you have never heard Samantha Shannon’s ‘strong-female-character’ speech you are missing out but I’m sure it will be made again soon!

The event came to a close with Kimi asking for questions from the audience. I always love hearing audience questions because they are always different to the person chairing the events questions. A personal favourite question came from fellow blogger Imi who asked Samantha about the weirdest thing a fan has asked her to do. Samantha said it was a guy who asked her to sign his boxers. She amongst other authors were asked to sign a pair of boxers and as you can imagine it was weird.

The event ended with an author signing and everyone queued and to get their books signed. This signing lasted until the bookstore was completely closed! Sorry to all the staff members we made wait after the store closed!

Right before the event ended the TEENSgate blogger group took a group picture with Samantha Shannon. This appear to have become a little tradition that we get a picture as a group with the author at the event. The blogger group that has been together nearly a year now mean the world to me and it is through the group I have made some of my closest and bestest friends. I don’t know what I would do without this little group of wonderful people!

Thank you so much to Samantha Shannon for coming to the event and chatting all about your books!! Also a massive thank you to my wonderful best friend Kimi for organising this wonderful event! Bring on the next book event!