Moving Manchester is a research project that was funded for three and a half years by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Moving Manchester spent four years (2006-2010) investigating the ways in which the experience of migration has impacted upon contemporary writing in the city and, by extension, the ways in which these multicultural publications and performances have impacted upon the urban population’s view of itself as well as the wider perception of Manchester as a British city. Visit Moving Manchester.
To this end, the project team has worked closely with several Manchester-based writers’ organisations and publishers such as Commonword, Gatehouse, The Black Arts Alliance, Comma Press, Manchester Irish Writers’ group and sought to actively promote the work of the writers and organisations concerned. These twin commitments, of academic research on the one hand and literature development on the other, are reflected in the project’s outputs which combine scholarly articles and books/ book chapters with an open-access electronic catalogue, an anthology of new writing (‘Migration Stories’, 2009) and a web-based Writers’ Gallery which features the work and profiles of some 30 Manchester-based writers.