City of Literature, Get in!

Yesterday, during UNESCO's annual conference, Manchester was named as an UNESCO City of Literature. Get in! The hard work for this started best part of a year ago as far as I remember, with Manchester Literature Festival, University of Manchester, ManMet (aka MMU), and the city council agreeing a bid. Lots of legwork from Kate Feld, who went to pretty much every live literature night in Manchester (rather her, than me!) as well as speaking to writers, publishers and others with an interest in Manchester as a literary scene. Jewels in our crown are old buildings - namely our four great libraries, Chethams, John Rylands, Portico and Central (our local libraries, like Didsbury, are gems as well) - and places for dead writers, namely the very undead Anthony Burgess Foundation, and the lovingly restored Elizabeth Gaskell house; as well as publishers such as Carcanet and Comma press.

It's an honour rather than a pot of money, but its great that this not only sees our two universities working together (a shame we still can't mention the S-word to make it 3!) but puts literature at the heart of the Mancunian regeneration story, when its often been well behind sport, music, architecture and the like. Anyway, not any more. The considerable assets of the city are of course its writers, who are many and plentiful. Last night I was at The Other Room, where James Davies and Scott Thurston, made rare appearances at their own night. Other Manc-based writers of note in the room included Neil Campbell, John G. Hall, Tom Jenks, Matt Dalby, Amy McCauley, and my good self; not a bad subset for a cold Tuesday night competing with Man Utd v Benfica, Jeanette Winterson and Rebecca Solnit elsewhere in the city, and of course Halloween.

Manchester's writing scene has been very grass roots and thrived outside of much civic interest or involvement - that will hopefully now follow. We are definitely needing some kind of writers' development programme, as well as more opportunities for writers to work, perform and publish in the city. All of which myself and others fed into the submission to the City of Literature application.

The official press release is here and my previous thoughts on Manchester as a writing city are here.http://artoffiction.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/manchester-city-of-literature.html

As a civic bauble its a nice one to have, and I've long been an advocate of us joining the UNESCO creative cities network, as I'd seen what a brilliant thing City of Literature had been for Norwich, and also how music cities like Ghent and Bologna have benefited, but of course, the hard work starts here: taking Manchester's many literary assets and promoting them as something other than history, but as a key part of our radical, working class, multicultural, intellectually stimulating past, present and future.