Norwich: England’s first UNESCO City of Literature. With hundreds of years of literary history, this is a city known for its creativity and inclusive community. Take Julian of Norwich, the first woman to be published in English, or the city’s welcoming of Strangers from Europe in the 1500s. And, of course, we’re home to the National Centre for Writing, recently awarded Place of Sanctuary status.
Here we talk to Peggy Hughes, Chief Executive of the National Centre for Writing, about the award, the great work they’re doing, and how storytelling can bring communities together. We are the City of Stories, after all!
Discover Dragon Hall in Norwich’s King Street Quarter
It means the world to us! It’s an honour for NCW to be recognised as a Place of Sanctuary and to stand alongside so many partners in Norwich who are working to ensure the city remains the welcoming place it has always proudly been.
To be a welcoming place and organisation is at the heart of our values, and we especially want to extend a friendly hand and an open door to those who need that welcome most: those new to the city, or new to writing, those who find themselves here because of challenging circumstances, through fleeing persecution and violence.
Being part of this network recognises our efforts, but more importantly, inspires us to continue, and hopefully ensures that those seeking what we offer can find us (and community and connection) more easily.
While NCW is rooted in Norwich at our beautiful Dragon Hall, we are open to the world. Norwich is England’s first UNESCO City of Literature (achieved in 2012), a shared designation for the city, steered by NCW, that celebrates our rich literary heritage and imagines what our shared stories can be. We take our place on the international stage alongside 52 other cities of literature, taking Norwich to the world and bringing the world to Norwich, but we also take seriously our commitment to the internationalism on our doorstep, the many voices and perspectives here in the city that make our story so rich and textured and interesting.
Norwich has a proud history of internationalism in its literary fabric, from Meir Ben Elijah challenging persecution in 1290, and Mother Julian, infamous across the world as the first woman to author a book in English (1395), to the global voices nurtured through the University of East Anglia’s world-renowned MA Creative Writing programme today. Our city story is brighter and our bookshelves better when we’re various!
Dragon Hall is a building with rich history
Our work in this area is only possible thanks to the partnership, guidance and support from a range of partners working in this area, and the following in particular have been instrumental in our journey.
New Routes have been working with and supporting refugees, asylum seekers and isolated migrants, and promoting cross-cultural integration and community awareness in Norwich since 2004, working with individuals and families from over 80 countries, speaking 60+ different languages. English Plus support new communities in Norwich to learn English, form friendships and to make the city a home, while The Zainab Project use cooking to bring people together and give refugees and asylum seekers in Norwich transferable skills needed to find future employment.
They have all been generous with their time and expertise in helping us to understand better the changing needs of refugee and asylum-seeking and migrant communities, and to ensure our programmes are devised with and for their intended communities. We’re delighted to have been able to work closely with them on writing workshops, feasts, storytelling and storymaking, and drop-in sessions. Funding from Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Wolfson Foundation, The Geoffrey Watling Charity, and The Linbury Trust has been vital in this work.
Anyone and everyone can get involved at the National Centre for Writing!
This recognition inspires and galvanises us in pursuing opportunities, partnerships and projects that ensure we are fulfilling our pledge as a place of welcome and sanctuary. Next on the immediate horizon is re-opening the building and garden to the public in April; a project working with food and storytelling in our new community kitchen; our Norfolk & Norwich Festival programme in May, and an exciting Refugee Week event in June (I’m told the Moomins by the incomparable Tove Jansson might feature…).
Yes! We have a broad programme of events on offer! Our free, drop-in Family Activity Days are a really good place to start to get to know us and Dragon Hall. And we’re also open to the public on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays from 6 April, for anyone who fancies a free, safe space to read, write and create.
The National Centre for Writing’s family activity days are a great way to get to know Dragon Hall
The theme of this year’s Refugee Week is ‘Community as a Superpower’, the theme we’re also adopting for the 10th anniversary this year of our Young Norfolk Writing Prize.
And community is a superpower, and a fundamental part of what it means to be a City of Literature as well as a place of welcome. Community is vital to creating belonging and connection and to feeling at home and like yourself in a place. And stories – making them, telling them, sharing them, writing them, having others hear your story – is at the heart of community-making. Stories and writing can offer courage, solidarity, and hope, all essential every day, but especially so in challenging times.
It’s incredibly important that we’re able to nurture and hear the stories from refugees and asylum-seeking communities, a vital counterpoint to toxic media narratives: stories from behind the headlines need to be supported, amplified and celebrated.
Books and stories are essential empathy machines: portable pieces of magic, and free from the library (and we’re blessed in our Millennium Library, also a Library of Sanctuary, for such a wonderful collection!). Books allow us to walk in someone else’s shoes like no other artform. To which, we’re very pleased to have been invited to curate a forthcoming Refugee Week reading list to be shared across Schools of Sanctuary nationwide in June.
We hope that Dragon Hall will provide an intersection and portal to all these possibilities – to writing, sharing and storymaking, to community and creativity – to those who need them most.
The National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall reopens on Sunday 6 April with free entry. You can check out their programme of events on their website.
