In 2019, The Portico Library will relaunch The Portico Prize: a major literary award celebrating contemporary writing that encapsulates ‘a sense of the North’. The Portico Library and the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University have come together to organise, in the months leading up to the announcement of the Prize, ‘Rewriting the North’: a series of events celebrating writers and writing connected with the North of England. In each event, two leading writers will read from their work and will discuss the role that place plays in their creative practice. ‘Rewriting the North’, then, will explore the relationship between writing and place across a range of forms and genres. By extension, it will celebrate how such writers and rewriters are reimagining the North of England.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. Between 2010-2016 she was an associate lecturer at Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Project 2013 and was published in 2014 by Kwani Trust (Kenya), by Transit (USA) 2017 and Oneworld (UK/Commonwealth) in 2018. Jennifer’s short story, Lets Tell This Story Properly won the overall Commonwealth Short story prize 2014. Her collection of short stories, Love Made In Manchester (working title) will be published by Transit (USA) and Oneworld (UK/Commonwealth) in Spring 2019. Her second novel, The Women, (Working title) will come out in 2020 published by Oneworld. Jennifer is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize 2018. She joins Manchester Metropolitan University as Lecturer in Creative Writing in June 2018.
Michelle Green is a British-Canadian writer, performer and artist based in the North of England. Their debut short story collection, Jebel Marra, was published by Comma Press in 2015 and was nominated for a number of national and international awards. Michelle is now working on a second collection: a map of short stories based on Hayling Island, near Portsmouth. In 2014, they collaborated on ‘Tales from the Towpath’: an immersive literature work for the Manchester Literature Festival. Michelle’s recent work on disability aesthetics in fiction and poetry was featured at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters, India, 2019.
Twitter: @MeeshECG