Norwich set to celebrate 10 years as a UNESCO City of Literature

“Every time I drive into Norwich from one of the main entrance points, I see that UNESCO City of Literature sign,” says the chief executive of the National Centre for Writing. “And I just think, yeah, take that everybody in London who said that Norwich doesn’t have books.”

The comment had been made to Chris by a publisher friend, tongue firmly in cheek.

But it came at a point when UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) was founding a series of global creative networks.

Edinburgh had been named the first City of Literature and Chris had been wondering whether Norwich should put in a bid join it.

“She was only joking, but I thought, right, I’m going to go back to Norwich tonight and really work on this now,” says Chris, who was then chief executive of Writers’ Centre Norwich.

“So we started talking to the university, to the city council, to the county council, to the cathedral, to the EDP, to the Jarrold family, to people in some of the amazing private libraries in the country houses around Norwich and Norfolk, to the Norfolk Record Office which has got its own UNESCO status because it’s such a brilliant record office. And we found out about all of these small presses across the city and the county.”

The evidence was compelling. The city and county have a tradition of fostering writers and radical thinkers – whether that’s the mystic Julian of Norwich who was the first woman in the world to have a book published in the English language or Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man.

“All of these amazing things came up,” says Chris.

“We found out that the city was home to the first provincial newspaper to be established outside of London, in 1701. The city was the home of the first provincial library in 1608 and Norwich was the first city to implement the public library act in 1850.

“It has the oldest arts festival in the country, the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, [founded] the first MA in creative writing and the world’s leading centre for literary translation, the British Centre for Literary Translation which was led by Max Sebald, famous for making the East Anglian landscape part of his novels.”

It was also the first UK City of Refuge for persecuted writers and for many years had the busiest public library in the country.

“I thought, do you know what we absolutely should be a UNESCO City of Literature so we started campaigning and in about 2009 I went to my first meeting and said we want to join,” says Chris.

To make the case for Norwich, they had to put together a bid document.

“We worked with the brilliant Magda Russell, and she did a lot of the research and pulled together all of these people, people with fancy civic necklaces and people with pointy hats from the universities. The Arts Council really helped us as well.”

Chris says that the bid process took about two and a half years. Then one day in late summer 2012, his phone rang.

“I just remember getting a phone call from someone in Paris saying, we’re going to announce that you have been admitted to the network and we’re going to announce it tomorrow, is that okay?

“We just ran around absolutely lunatic crazy for 24 hours and then we launched into the network.”

At that point there were only five other UNESCO cities of literature in the world: Edinburgh, Melbourne, Dublin, Iowa City and Reykjavik. Norwich was the first in England – it's since been joined by Exeter, Manchester and Nottingham – and the global network has now expanded to 36.

Having won the coveted status, they distilled their vision down to three simple aims.

The first was for everybody who lives, works in or visits Norwich to have knowledge about and access to the city’s amazing literary history.

“We just wanted people to know what an amazing place Norwich had been, how it was packed full of characters who were writing to change history for the better,” says Chris.

“Like the Hansard brothers, who were from Norwich Over the Water, who set up the very first recorded publication of the proceedings of parliament to make democracy transparent. Or Thomas Paine from Thetford, whose book The Rights of Man led to the civil rights movement and the American War of Independence.”

Their second aim was to give people access to all the brilliant things that happen in the city around books and writing.

“At that point the Millennium Library had been the busiest library in the country for six years in a row. Then there’s the UEA and Norwich University of the Arts, which is an amazing place which had a world reputation for book design courses.

“We wanted people to have access to our festivals and our events at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Waterstones and the Book Hive and all of these publishers like Galley Beggar Press and Propolis and Salt in Cromer and the UEA Strangers Press. We just wanted people to enjoy and have knowledge about that,” says Chris.

They also established two eagerly-anticipated dates on Norwich’s cultural calendar: the City of Literature festival, which runs in May as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and the Noirwich crime writing festival which is held in partnership with UEA in September.

And finally, they wanted people to get together and think about the future and how UNESCO City of Literature status could not only raise Norwich’s profile internationally and nationally, but also how it could benefit the people who live and work there.

The answer was to create a physical home, and that become the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall in King Street.

“Up until that point Writers’ Centre Norwich had just been in a little office, first of all on King Street and then on Princes Street, so from 2013 to 2018 we raised two and a bit million pounds,” says Chris.

“We did the work, in the face of austerity and lots of people not thinking that Norwich should be home to a national centre for anything, never mind one for writing, and we opened in 2018.

“We’ve done residencies, we’ve now got a cottage where we have writers and translators from all over the world coming to stay here and we’ve commissioned all sorts of new writing and blogs and podcasts,” says Chris.

There have also been memorable city-wide events, such as the Talking Statues trail where people could download monologues written for historical figures by luminaries including Stephen Fry and Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent.

And its schools projects have been taken into hundreds of classrooms to nurture the talents of the next generation of writers.

Of course, during the pandemic they have had to change the ways in which they reach out to people.

They’ve held events virtually, including Noirwich and the East Anglian Book Awards ceremony. And they worked with Young Norfolk Arts Trust to produce resource packs for teachers and young people to use during the lockdowns.

And they’ve recently launched a consultation to shape their activities over the next five years.

The 10th anniversary celebrations kick off with the City of Literature festival from May 27-29. Highlights include Kit de Waal, author of My Name Is Leon, coming to give the annual Harriet Martineau lecture, named for the radical writer who was born in Norwich.

A.K Blakemore, whose debut novel The Manningtree Witches won the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize will be in conversation with Guinevere Glasfurd.

And there will be a joint party and small publisher’s fair with Galley Beggar Press, which published Eimear McBride’s acclaimed debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, and is also marking its first decade.

Reflecting on the last 10 years, what have been Chris’s highlights?

“In 2019, I think 35 out of the 36 cities of literature came to Norwich and they then went on to spend two days in Nottingham, so we pulled it together and called it Nottwich.

“It was the first ever gathering of the global cities of literature. We had Piers Harrison-Reid read to us and we had Ali Smith do an event at the Playhouse and we had this lovely reception where we stood in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour at City Hall and looked out across the balcony onto the market and the castle as the sun set. We just watched them falling in love with Norwich.”

And what is it that makes writers in particular fall in love with Norwich?

“In some ways what encourages people is that there’s already lots of writing and words going on here,” says Chris.

“But how did that happen in the first place? What we discovered was that Norwich had this very long history of dissent and challenge, people who didn’t take the easy route and who wanted to make life better for people and challenge the status quo and a number of those were writers.

“Whether it was Harriet Martineau, whether it was Julian of Norwich, whether in recent times it was people like Stephen Fry who was really an early champion of mental health issues, it’s people who have used books and words and plays and music with lyrics to change things for the better.

“I even think about Norwich Research Park, which is home to three of the six biggest UK research institutes and it’s got these scientists who produce more written papers than virtually anywhere else in the country. And all of these words talking about how to change the world and make things better are pouring out of this city and county.

“Norwich nurtures people who think writing and reading are important.

“We’re of a certain size and a certain density and a certain ambition where we know that we’re as good as anywhere else in the world, but we’ve got a bit more time and space to think. It’s just a very unique set of circumstances here,” says Chris.

To find out more about events and workshops at the National Centre for Writing visit nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk

For the full City of Literature festival weekend line-up and to buy tickets see nnfestival.org.uk