New Writing North is the writing development agency for the North East of England. It is a unique organisation within the UK, merging individual development work with writers across all mediums with educational work and the production of creative projects. New Writing North works with writers to develop career opportunities, new commissions, projects, residencies, publications and live events.

We work in partnership with a broad range of organisations, universities, local authorities, regional development agencies, sponsors and media producers to develop opportunities for writers in and outside of the North East. We also work with theatres in the region to develop new writing for the stage.

We deliver both the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award and the Northern Writers’ Awards programmes within our region.

New Writing North’s international programme, Lingua Franca, aspires to create partnerships and projects for writers from the region with their international counterparts. We are currently working on two projects with the British Council in Bulgaria and Russia and in 2004 plan to produce an International Festival of Stories.

Magnetic North, our live events programme, focuses on the commissioning of new work for live performance in the field of poetry and prose and promotes events that celebrate the successes of regional writers.

We offer training to writers who want to work with young people and our writers in schools programme includes work with individual schools, Education Action Zones and Creative Partnership programmes. The Radio 4 documentary Excluded focused on one of our writing residencies which took place in a school for excluded young people in County Durham.

New Writing North’s programme of writing residencies supports writers to work with both public and private organisations including the Post Office, Nexus, operators of the Tyne and Wear Metro service and with the BBC Tyne news website.

For more information on our work, see our website at : www.newwritingnorth.com