UNDERTOW 2024 submissions are now closed. We will be announcing the winners soon.
UNDERTOW is the UK’s first creative development scheme specifically focused on multilingual creativity. English is an additional language for over 20% of primary school children in the UK. Millions of young people live polylingual lives, switching back and forth between languages and cultures. UNDERTOW was created to embrace the massive creative potential in this group and ignite a passion for poetry that runs wild between languages and fosters multilingual creativity.
Tutors and workshop leaders from the past two years include Juana Adcock, the Mexican-British poet and translator, the award-winning poet Inua Ellams, Theresa Cisneros, of the Wellcome Trust, the Turner Prize-winning Array Collective, Tolu Agbelusi, a Nigerian British, poet, playwright, and Victoria Adukwei Bulley, winner of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.
This year UNDERTOW will be run in collaboration with Manchester Poetry Library, Sing Lit Station and The Writing Squad. The programme will be lead by Kit Fan.
Kit Fan will be the lead tutor on the course this year, delivering workshops and providing one-on-one mentoring, both with an emphasis on deepening the participants’ critical engagement with their own work. He says: “A language, like a culture, is not an island. I’m thrilled to be part of UNDERTOW, a multi-faceted developmental programme to support polylingual poets to reflect and scrutinise their art and craft.”
The participants will also all be paired with a young multilingual poet in Singapore for peer-to-peer mentoring to help them further develop their multilingual creativity as part of our international partnership with Sing Lit Station.
The programme will be run by the PTC in Partnership with Manchester Poetry Library and SingLit Station, Singapore. The majority of the course will be delivered online over seven months, with monthly activities and peer-to-peer sessions, plus there will be meet-ups in Manchester to explore the library’s collection and get workshop facilitation training.
Manchester Poetry Library
Manchester Poetry Library (MPL) is the North West’s first public poetry library – open to all. Based at Manchester Metropolitan University, we host a collection of over 14,000 books and recordings profiling 20th and 21st century poets, a growing children’s collection, and a languages collection co-curated with bilingual and multilingual poets. MPL has a year-round learning programme for readers and writers, as well as free events, workshops and an exhibition programme.
Sing Lit Station
Sing Lit Station’s core mission is to serve Singapore’s literary community of writers and readers, through: creating a space for writers to grow their artistic and professional lives, inviting readers to explore our literary culture, and working with many partners to build inclusive and dynamic communities. Sing Lit Station’s flagship programmes include our workshop-for-schools programme Book A Writer, our community challenge / writing forum SingPoWriMo, and our annual Manuscript Bootcamp. Learn more about Singaporean literature through our websites poetry.sg and prose.sg.
The Writing Squad
The Writing Squad exists to create the next generation of writers in the North of England. We are a community of artists who make new work together and support each other’s development.#