About the Project
Moving Manchester investigates how the experience of migration has influenced creative writing in Manchester since 1960. It investigates the city's unique writing cultures and traditions and considers how Manchester's writing is inflected by place, both local and global. The project is informed by the work of thinkers such as Brah (1996), Braziel and Mannur (2002), Caplan (1996), Krishnaswarmy (1995), McLeod (2004) and Procter (2003), who have made a strong case for adopting a 'devolved' focus on the literary productions of multi-racial Britain.
We are also interested in the commercial and (multi)cultural logic by which novels by Northern writers are coded as (un)worthy of national and international readerships by corporate publishers and high street retail outlets. This is a pressing concern for many of Manchester's black writers, whose work is often eclipsed by the corporate literary canon. Our electronic catalogue attempts to redress such imbalances by providing over 200 synopses of writing by Manchester residents since 1960. These novels, plays, poetry collections and anthologies of short stories inform a full-length academic study, to be published after the project ends in September 2009.
Complementing the project's sustained focus on published material is a commitment to support and commission new writing. Very recently commissioned writing can be found on our Writer's Gallery, which is edited by Graham Mort. The Gallery showcases new pieces by selected Manchester-based writers and provides photographic portraits, biographical information, bibliographies and writers' commentaries on their own work.
More new writing will appear in the forthcoming special issue of the Moving Worlds journal, edited by Corinne Fowler and Graham Mort, which will be published to coincide with our Glocal Imaginaries conference in September 2009. At this conference, a key Manchester writing organisation called Commonword will be selling Migration, their latest anthology of new creative writing from Manchester.
Moving Manchester is also funding two doctoral creative writing studentships for novelists Rajeev Balasubramanyam and Tariq Mehmood, who hope to complete in 2009.
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Paintings are copyrighted to Michael Gutteridge