Alan Bissett is an author and playwright. Alan Bissett’s Pack Men is surely the first novel to be written about the Manchester riots at the 2008 UEFA Cup Final, as old friends gather up to face the unfolding violence and their own personal tensions. After the publication of his first two novels, Boyracers and The Incredible Adam Spark, he became known for his different take on Scots dialect writing, suffused with popular culture references and socialist politics. Bissett used to lecture in at the University of Leeds