Website: www.newwritingnorth.com
Date: Mon 1 Mar 2004

It's been a busy year for Claire Malcolm and the team at New Writing North. They started the year by moving from their tiny office opposite a building site on Newcastle's Quayside to the rather more sedate surroundings of Whickham. Not content with launching the new season of Magnetic North events, she spent last week guiding a party of Russian guests (pictured left with David Almond) around the literary hotspots of the north east and in a couple of weeks' time will host the third edition of the Northern Rock Writer's Award and the Northern Writers' Awards. Claire took a moment out of her busy schedule to speak to LNE.

So what was going on with those Russians last week?
A party of writers, teachers, librarians and youth newspaper editors visited the north east to look at the work that we do with writers in schools and with reading development projects for young people. They were especially interested in the work that we have done with the Creative Partnerships programme, as this work is of a longer duration than many of our projects. We are now aiming to take a group of writers, teachers and journalists to Novosibirsk, Siberia in April so that they can see how the Russians work with young writers and readers and so that we can look to set up some international collaborations and links between schools. Long term we want to open up opportunities for writers from both areas and set up exchange projects with schools.

What are the benefits to the region of international projects like these?
I believe that it widens the horizons of everyone involved, opens new doors for collaborative projects, promotes the good work that is done in this region to a much wider audience and helps to facilitate the translation of writers' work into new languages.

How did you get involved?
I visited Moscow a couple of years ago to attend a book fair and met lots of interesting writers and literature people. I met someone who worked for an agency in Siberia and the way she described what it was like to live and work in Siberia reminded me of something that a teacher had said to me about a school we were working in in County Durham. I joked that it would be quite a challenge to set up a project between County Durham and Siberia, on paper it looks very unlikely. At the time we were also developing a project with the British Council which involved a writers' exchange with Bulgaria. This project went well and we began to talk to them about other ideas and our interest in Russia. It turned out that the British Council were interested in developing creative reading and writing projects in Russia and the project fell into place.

How does this fit in with the work NWN does in schools?
It extends the work that we do into new territories and broadens the horizons that we can offer to teachers and to young people. It also shows off to a wider audience some of the innovative work that we have in this region, such as Bill Herbert's creative writing course for teachers which is unique.

How about the West Park project?
The Writing West Park project is a large scale creative writing project that we are undertaking with schools in Darlington and is inspired by the West Park building development in the town. The project is sponsored by building firm Bussey and Armstrong, who have employed Bill Herbert to create a poetry plan for the housing and community development of the site. (Bill will be naming streets and creating public art across the development.) In June we will be staging an exhibition of work generated by the project at Darlington Arts Centre.

The writers' awards are now into their third year. What impact do you think they've made to the region's writing community?
The awards have made a big difference to individual writers in the region - you only have to look at the success of writers such as Jacob Polley, who has now gone on to achieve wonderful things with his work. The awards work for writers in different ways, via the Northern Promise Award we are able to support first-time writers to further their work towards publication, with the Time to Write Awards we are able to support established writers who just need the time off from other commitments to finish work and with the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award we can support wonderful writers to work unhindered by financial concerns for three years.

The awards also show how well this region thinks of its writers and how well they are treated! The Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award sends out a very strong message to the rest of the country that we do things differently up here and that we take our cultural lives very seriously.

What's Magnetic North?
Magnetic North is a programme of live literature events that we are working on for the next year or so. Coming up are a spring programme of events and then a summer festival, Fresh Fiction, which will focus on new novels, more Orange Young Writer's activity in the summer holidays and in the autumn half term, and the International Festival of Stories this October, which is a short story-inspired project in collaboration with Northern Stage. We run the programme in conjunction with Newcastle University's School of English and Newcastle City Library.

And what's New Writing North going to be doing next?
Having a bloody rest! All of the Magnetic North events make this a busy year for us alongside many education projects, a visit to Russia in April and lots of planning and development around playwriting initiatives. We also hope to be able to run more courses again this year, funding permitting.