The Faber Lecture 2025: Gary Younge - Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance

Advance tickets for this event are now available for MLF Get Closer Members to buy. Memberships start at £25 per year - for full details of membership benefits and buying options click HERE. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Thursday 14 August at 10am.

Award-winning author, broadcaster and Professor of Sociology at The University of Manchester, Gary Younge, delivers the inaugural Faber Lecture. In Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance, Gary explores what has been termed as the ‘burden of representation’ and the pressures exerted upon the relatively small group of people from underrepresented communities who break through into elite spaces and the expectations that may come from those with power and those without. These are issues that have framed, frustrated, inspired and inflected his entire working life as a writer.

In this incisive and moving personal lecture, Gary offers reflections on how to navigate representation, power and responsibility whilst keeping your job, your sanity and your freedom both as a human being and as a writer.

Gary Younge is an award-winning journalist and former Editor at Large for The Guardian. In 2025 he was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Award for Journalism and in 2023 he received the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He has written seven books including Another Day in the Death of America and Dispatches from the Diaspora; From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter.

Presented in partnership with Faber Members, Creative Manchester and the University of Manchester’s Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity.

Faber Members is free to join HERE

Wheelchair Users and those with other access needs requiring a free Essential Carer ticket should contact the Quaytickets Box Office on 0161 876 2015 to purchase tickets.