Manchester City of Literature are inviting poets to apply for consideration to be a new Multilingual City Poet alongside our current City Poet Nóra Blascsók.

The City Poets will work together across our partnership network, acting as an ambassador for Manchester’s residents, communities, and literature organisations. The City Poet roles carry a civic responsibility, much like conventional Poet Laureate designations, and the appointees will be commissioned to both produce and translate new writing, as well as contribute to the development of poetry in education and community settings through an engagement project of their choice.  

Commissioned work will either respond to themes relevant to the poets via key dates and projects in the 2026 calendar year (e.g. past poems include Anjum Malik’s We Are Butterflies Forever in Flight poetry film and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight’s SPEECH ACT for a Manchester City of Literature x Nanjing City of Literature collaborative project) or respond to other exciting public events and community outreach programmes coordinated by Manchester City of Literature and its partnership network (e.g. Nóra Blascsók’s Guernica Children for Manchester Literature Festival ). The poets will also translate each other’s writing into their mother tongue.

Manchester has a rich literary tradition, as home to some exceptional and high-profile poets, a thriving poetry and spoken word scene, awarding-winning publishers and writing development agencies and libraries which place writing and community outreach at the heart of their work. This heritage is represented in Manchester’s designation as an UNESCO City of Literature in 2017.

The newly appointed City Poet will occupy the role for a period of one year (alongside Nóra Blascsók). The City Poets will each be paid a total fee of £3,250 for a number of key deliverables that make up each City Poet position, including poetry commissions, poetry translations and a piece of community engagement work (full details can be found in the info pack below).

Key dates:

• Midnight on Sunday 18 January 2026: Closing date for applications. 
• w/c 19th January 2026: Notification of shortlisted applicants. 
• Last two weeks of January 2026: Interviews will take place online.