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The Lightest of All Luggage is an 80-page multilingual poetry anthology bringing together work by Manchester’s Multilingual City Poets across six languages (English, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, Hungarian and Ukrainian).
Created in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University, the anthology celebrates Manchester as a city shaped by many mother tongues, and the literary, cultural and community worlds that make those languages visible, lived and valued.
‘When I wrote the line ‘this lightest of all luggage’ in my ghazal poem, ‘This Here,’ I was struck by the realisation that languages held magic powers. They stay with us, travel with us, unseen, deeply rooted.’ From the Foreword, by Anjum Malik.
‘When I wrote the line ‘this lightest of all luggage’ in my ghazal poem, ‘This Here,’ I was struck by the realisation that languages held magic powers. They stay with us, travel with us, unseen, deeply rooted.’
From the Foreword, by Anjum Malik.
The poets featured in the anthology are: Ali Al-Jamri, Anjum Malik, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, Jova Bagioli Reyes and Nóra Blascsók. The anthology was launched at a special event to celebrate International Mother Language Day 2026 at the John Rylands Library.
Acknowledgements: Hawwa Alam (Producer), Sarah Cleave (Supervision), Carlos Marfil & Quinn Rowbottom (Editorial), Nicola Jane Henry (Illustration) and Anjum Malik (Foreword).
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