Real Contentment was a 2024-2025 artist exchange that saw the start of a lasting partnership between Manchester and Nanjing, both UNESCO Cities of Literature and UNESCO Cities of Lifelong Learning.

Showcasing the collaborative creative spirit of the cities, this cross-cultural project with Nanjing in China was named after a poem by Nanjing-born Han Dong who was one of the featured artists.

Working in both cities, the six artists include a Forward Prize shortlisted poet, two award-winning TV and script writers, one of China’s most revered poets, a founding member of the Nanjing Calligraphy Academy and a Programme Leader at MMU.

• Han Dong
• Amy Lever
• Zhou Meisen
• Eleanor Mulhearn
• Charlotte Shevchenko Knight
• Yao Yuan

Thanks to funding from British Council’s International Collaboration Grants, the artists have worked together to create a huge wealth of work. An anthology of written work is available at Manchester Poetry Library and Manchester Central Library and will be published in Nanjing later in 2025 as the city curates an exhibition around it.

Playwrights Amy Lever and Zhou Meisen developed a playscript each, drawing on the history of the forced deportation of Chinese sailors from Liverpool during World War II, developing what the producer described as “a trans-creation of the [each] other; naturally contextualised to their playwrights with different cultural, generational life backgrounds.”

Poets Han Dong and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight both developed sequences of poetry based on the very different rivers in their respective cities, the Yangtze and the Medlock.

Visual artists Yao Yuan and Eleanor Mulhearn also developed work about rivers, with Mulhearn (and Shevchenko Knight) developing relationships with an aqua-biologist expert in the history of the much less visible Medlock in Manchester.

Mulhearn’s sequence of “river writings”, Truths and Tales of the River Medlock, depicts an urban river altered by people and industry from its origins, creating both visual and imaginative images that invoke reflection on how the environment is always man-made, especially in a place as entwined with the industrial revolution as Manchester.

Those culverts and the omitted parts of the Medlock become the very shape of Charlotte Shevchenko Knight’s poem “SPEECH ACT: a river in eight culverts”. The poem’s form and lineation echoes the specific shapes of eight parts of the Medlock, sometimes in curving lines. 

“levees appearing to guide
the medlock somewhere
she does not want to go –
a strange palm
on the small of her back –”

Launched at Festival of Libraries 2025 that took place in June, the delegation from Nanjing were hosted here in Manchester at a celebratory event in Grosvenor East Theatre, where there were readings, films, live translations, an exhibition of artwork by schoolchildren in both cities, paintings on display and included a visit and speech from the UK Ambassador for UNESCO Anna Nsubuga.

 

This project has been made possible with funding and support from the British Council.

 

The project is delivered in partnership with: