The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met is one of the most successful literary centres running in the UK today, and home to the country’s largest postgraduate English and Creative Writing community.

The School’s Creative Director is Carol Ann Duffy DBE (Poet Laureate 2009-2019), and she teaches alongside a team of distinguished practising writers and critics. We also host a number of high-profile Visiting Fellows who contribute to Manchester Writing School teaching, projects and public events.

More than 95 of their students and graduates have embarked upon publishing careers, launching first books, with many more achieving publication in journals and magazines, winning writing awards and prizes, and setting up small presses and anthologies. Alumni include winners of the Costa First Novel Award and Forward Poetry Prize, and a long-listing for the Man Booker Prize.

They are home to a suite of ambitious outreach projects including the Manchester Children’s Book Festival and Mother Tongue Other Tongue, an international multilingual poetry competition that celebrates cultural diversity and the many languages spoken in schools in the UK. The School has a strong Manchester presence, with links to many of the city’s major cultural and arts organisations, and also a global reach with students and alumni based across the UK and continental Europe, and in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia.

The annual Manchester Writing Competition seeks to celebrate Manchester as an international city of writers, finding and celebrating diverse new voices from around the world and creating opportunities for writer development. The Competition has awarded more than £195,000 to writers.