Migration in Manchester

Creative writing project set to showcase city’s talent.

Voices from Manchester’s migrant community will take centre stage in a new creative writing project led by the Departments of English and Creative Writing and European Languages and Cultures at Lancaster University.

Moving Manchester is a long overdue celebration of Greater Manchester's talented creative writers, from 1960 to the present, who have taken the experience of migration as their theme.

On Wednesday, June 14, the Moving Manchester Project will be launched at the Central Library Conference rooms, Manchester, from 5-7pm, with three short readings from forthcoming books by their authors and a short presentation of the project by Lancaster University researcher Corinne Fowler and novelist Pete Kalu.

From the first black Caribbean migrant dock workers and the Punjabi Curry
mile restaurateurs, to Jewish migrants from Poland and Irish settlers fleeing the troubles and unemployment, they’re what make modern Manchester the place it is today. Over the last forty years, these narratives have challenged and enriched Greater Manchester's cultural life.

Over the next three years, the Moving Manchester project will search through the archives and promote Greater Manchester fiction, poetry, autobiography, drama and screenplay; it will stimulate the literary recognition that Greater Manchester’s writers deserve by compiling an electronic library catalogue of the writing, publishing an anthology of Greater Manchester’s hottest new writing talent and creating a website or ‘shop window’ for writers to showcase their work.

The project – which is co-ordinated by Lancaster University’s Department of English and Creative Writing - will also produce a detailed study on the development of writing in the Manchester area.

Moving Manchester is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and will work in close collaboration with writers, the Arts Council, local publishers and writers’ groups, museums and archivists.

Greater Manchester novelists, performance poets, playwrights, independent and mainstream publishers, the Black Arts Alliance, community workers, arts council funders, researchers and community activists will be present at the event.