You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
New Writing North is leading the creation of a new centre for literature in Tyneside. Already home to Inpress, the Poetry Book Society and Mslexia, the North-East has a vibrant and high-quality literature offering.
Between them, the organisations run national awards, national book clubs and magazines, talent development programmes, events and festivals. However, the organisations believe that their offers to the public are not as visible as they could be. The new centre intends to raise the profile of these "hidden gems" in the North-East’s cultural landscape, and "give them the profile that they deserve regionally and nationally, enabling them to grow their audiences and offer broader public engagement and benefit", says New Writing North chief executive Claire Malcolm.
Malcolm added: "We are working with partners in the city to identify a potential site for the new centre, and hope to have confirmed a location and partnership structure soon. Our ambition is for the new centre to bring together industry, education and the arts and we are also now beginning to talk to partners across the country who may want to work with us.
"There’s great potential for the centre to host a Northern office space for publishers and for national literary and charity sector partners to house staff with us. We’re also working on building a vision for how our civic role will work, from what the bookselling offer will be to creating a wide-ranging programme of readings and literary events that extend our work into new areas and with new audiences and participants."
This was written as part of The Bookseller's focus on publishing in the north of England; for more content from this focus, head here.