Results and submissions : REF 2021

‘Talking across differences’: Enabling new writing from the multilingual classroom ...

Submitting institution: Manchester Metropolitan University
Unit of assessment: 27 - English Language and Literature
Summary impact type: Cultural
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?: No

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1. Summary of the impact

The second half of Carol Ann Duffy’s laureateship (2014-19) was characterised by the development of new writers, with an emphasis on poetry as a democratic art form. Significant impacts have been achieved through her leadership of major projects such as Mother Tongue Other Tongue (MTOT), the Manchester Poetry and Fiction prizes and Write Where We Are Now (WWWAN). MTOT is a multilingual poetry competition for school pupils that received a Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2019: as testimonials from the schools indicate, MTOT has increased the self-confidence of bilingual and multilingual pupils, enhanced inclusivity and cultural exchange in the classroom, and fostered co-creation between children and their families. Feedback on the Manchester Poetry and Fiction prizes demonstrates that the competitions have inspired young, emerging writers from diverse backgrounds to work with major publishers such as Penguin, and apply for grants and fellowships to further their writing careers. WWWAN initiated and then archived a global poetic response to the advent of COVID-19 in early 2020: with a media reach of 352,861,861 across ten countries, WWWAN led the way in creating and voicing a sense of international community at a time of national crisis.

2. Underpinning research

Between 2000 and 2014 Carol Ann Duffy published four poetry collections: Feminine Gospels (2002) [1], Rapture (2005) [2], The Bees (2011) [3] and Ritual Lighting (2014) [4]. Early short love lyrics such as ‘White Writing’ from Feminine Gospels are expanded into the extended sequence of love poems in Rapture that won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2005. The rooting of, or longing for, the transcendent in ordinariness in poems such as ‘Bridgewater Hall’ or ‘Epiphany’ from Rapture sow the seeds for further explorations of quotidian British life in later Laureate poems like ‘The Counties’ and ‘Oxfam’ (published in The Bees), which are characterised by a rare ability to speak for, and to, a broad audience beyond those familiar with poetry, connecting with their own experiences of childhood, parenthood, love and loss. All this is explored and expressed—from the earliest books through the laureate years—in poems of great clarity, inviting new readers into not just her own books, but the English lyric tradition to which she constantly alludes.

The theories of change for the projects described in this case study are anchored in this creative practice, which treat the personal and cultural aspects of language, identity and experience as the raw material for a poetic technique that can be learned, and is available to everyone. Poetry in these projects, as in Duffy’s own work, is crafted from immediate and near-to-hand materials and voices, brought together in acts of sharing and community, through the media and on the printed page. Duffy’s poem ‘Poetry’, for example, in The Bees sets out an ars poetica with its insistence that the ordinary—a pint of Guinness, the crescent moon, insects—can be rendered as, respectively, a nun, a boomerang and as ‘music scored on the air’. This belief that the materials of poems can be ordinary and accessible, and that any of us can become a maker, was the defining vision of Duffy’s later laureateship, and its legacy is enduringly inscribed in the Manchester Writing School’s mission to enable new writing.

The projects described here also draw on a career’s experience of creative leadership through curation, which has generated 11 edited poetry anthologies; six of these have been published since 2000. Duffy’s work over the past decade has addressed themes of national and global fragmentation and crisis, including climate change ( The Bees), Brexit ( My Country **[5]**) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Her public curatorial projects address these crises directly, bringing together new writers with diverse voices to counter disengagement, fragmentation and isolation.

4. Details of the impact

Duffy established the Manchester Children’s Book Festival in 2010: since then, annual festival activities that give children and families access to leading children’s authors have been embedded within a year-round programme engaging directly with teachers, schools and communities. This festival has initiated a series of key projects, the most significant of which is Mother Tongue Other Tongue, a multilingual poetry competition. MTOT is a practice-led project rooted in close collaboration between writers and English teachers with a desire to keep creativity alive in the classroom. It has given rise to a wealth of new writing from the young participants, much of which is preserved and curated in the project anthologies. It has also inspired new research on the impact of creative multilingualism in education [A]. In 2019, during its eighth year , MTOT won a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education, an honour which recognises research that ‘innovates and delivers real benefit to the wider world and public’ [B]. The panel chose to reward a project which takes ‘a practical approach to social cohesion’, and uses creativity to foster an ‘appreciation of cultural diversity’ [C].

Duffy launched MTOT in 2012 as a pilot project, and in 2013 it was rolled out nationally as a Laureate Education Project. Independent regional versions of the competition have continued, with Manchester Writing School (MWS) running MTOT for over 40 schools located principally in the Northwest. With 2300 entries from the Northwest in 2020, we estimate that across the eight annual iterations of the competition, including the years in which it had national reach, over 40,000 pupils between the ages of 9 and 17 in 77 participating schools have responded to its prompt to write poetry either in a language that they are learning at school, or in a language that they speak at home. MTOT supplements and challenges the national curriculum’s marginalisation of creative writing, and its positioning of standard English and English literary heritage as a privileged norm, by nurturing bi- and multilingualism. The project also celebrates the underlying cultural resources as valuable creative assets. This process has increased the confidence of bi- and multilingual pupils, and facilitated the exchange of cultural knowledge in the classroom. Schools are supported to engage with MTOT via CPD for teachers, creative resources and multilingual poetry workshops designed and delivered by Duffy and other Manchester Writing School poets. Winning pupils perform at an annual event hosted by Duffy and celebrity guests, who have included Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and the poet Imtiaz Dharker. MTOT entries are then collated in an anthology published on the project website and distributed to participating schools. Since 2014 the anthology has been accretive, adding each year’s winning entries to those from previous years. The 2020 iteration features 41 mother tongue poems and reflective commentaries, representing 22 community languages [D].

A 2019 evaluation of the MTOT project, involving 35 teachers and 336 pupils, informed our successful submission for the Queen’s Anniversary Prize. The report demonstrated that MTOT was achieving its outcomes in increasing the self-confidence of bilingual and multilingual pupils, enhancing inclusivity and cultural exchange in the classroom, and fostering dialogue and co-creation between children and their families [E]. 84% of the pupils said the competition ‘has made me feel more connected to my cultural background’, and 78% declared that writing poetry ‘made them feel more free to express their personal experience and identity than other forms of writing’. A primary school teacher wrote in her post-engagement diary that ‘Children's confidence and cultural pride definitely increased and improved, especially after our fantastic visit from your poets’, and the mother of a primary school pupil reflected that it helped her daughter to ‘build a stronger link to [her mother tongue] and gave her an appreciation of her ability to speak another language.’ MTOT was pivotal to Manchester’s successful 2017 bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature, and it has informed three iterations to date of the City’s celebration of International Mother Language Day. The latter forms one of Manchester City of Literature’s six keystone projects, with poets leading thousands of schoolchildren each year in multilingual poetry writing and performance [F].

Alongside MTOT, Duffy and the Manchester Writing School have also enabled new writing through two international writing competitions that award the UK’s largest prizes for unpublished work in poetry and fiction. Duffy created the prizes specifically to nurture the careers of a diverse range of new and emerging writers, and she was the main judge on the tenth anniversary of the competitions in 2018. Lucy Ingrams, the Manchester Poetry Prize winner in 2015, described the competition as ‘one of the most powerful intersections in the UK between new writing and the wider world’. Since 2013, the competitions have received 21,170 entries, with 17 winners and 95 shortlisted writers. In 2018 and 2019 alone, the competition attracted 5,184 entries from 81 countries. Offering one of the most lucrative prizes in creative writing in the UK, the MWS has invested £140,000 during the current REF period in developing a new generation of authors. Shortlisted and winning writers have consistently emphasised the credibility it gave them with agents, publishers, readers and audiences, and the boost the competition gave to their confidence in writing. Mona Arshi, who won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2014, used the prize money to complete her debut collection Small Hands, which won the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize in 2015. Drawing on her Filipino heritage, Romalyn Ante submitted a manuscript which won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2017. This submission developed into her acclaimed debut collection Antiemetic for Homesickness, which was published by Penguin in 2020. Ante commented that the prize boosted her confidence to ‘write in [her] second language’, apply for grants and approach publishers. Antiemetic for Homesickness was subsequently named as The Observer ‘Poetry book of the month’ in July 2020. Ante commented that ‘The prize has put me out there – in the “world of poetry”. Winning helped me realize that I deserved to be heard and that I could contribute, as a writer, to the culture of UK poetry’. US writer Sakinah Hofler, a Manchester Poetry Prize Finalist in 2016 and a Manchester Fiction Prize Winner in 2017, commented that her shortlisting in 2016 inspired her to continue writing just when her teaching contract in the US had been cancelled. In 2019, Hofler returned as a judge for the Manchester Fiction Prize at the annual awards ceremony at Chethams Library. The initial shortlisting ‘gave me the confidence’, she commented, ‘to keep submitting and keep believing in my work’. Winning the Fiction prize then enabled her to overcome what she termed her ‘imposter syndrome’ as a writer. The 10K prize money also allowed her to take time off work to complete a draft of her first novel, and to start applying for writers’ fellowships. A former chemical and quality engineer, she is now an Albert C. Yates Fellow at the University of Cincinnati [G].

Following this commitment through MTOT and the Manchester Poetry Prize to nurture a diverse range of new writing, Duffy initiated the WWWAN project during the first 2020 national lockdown as a response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Conceived by Duffy as ‘a radical reinvention of the anthology form’, WWWAN has solicited and curated new work from a wide range of emergent voices and established poets from 16 different countries, including Bangladesh, India and Nigeria: all the writers shared their contributions digitally in real time. Duffy invited the poets to write directly about the pandemic or about the situation they found themselves in during lockdown: their responses were published on the Manchester Writing School website, which featured 607 poems from 207 poets by 30/6/20. Global media coverage of WWWAN between 20/4/2020 and 7/8/2020 had a total reach of 352,861,861 across ten countries, and the website had received 174,000 hits by the end of August [H]. Readers of the poetry were encouraged to tweet their responses, including poetry of their own, and these responses had a reach of 2,164,570 across 19 countries [I]. The poems describe widespread feelings of isolation and separation under lockdown, but they also record the experiences of writers working on the frontline such as Ante, who is an NHS nurse.

Inspired by Duffy’s WWWAN initiative, the Manchester Writing School launched an archive to collect poetry written by the public about their experiences of the pandemic and lockdown in mid-August. By December 2020 this archive had received 264 submissions from 13 countries, including Bulgaria, Singapore and Trinidad: submissions came from entire community groups, as well as from individuals. It is envisaged that, alongside the WWWAN collection, this archive will be curated and made available to the public via the newly established Manchester Poetry Library as a repository of creative responses to the Coronavirus pandemic. The long-term aim is to facilitate a wider public understanding of poetry alongside the complex dynamics of health and wellbeing under lockdown conditions, and to educate and inspire future generations of readers [J]. WWWAN and its archive have been received as intended by Duffy, as a living record that created and voiced a sense of community at a time of universal crisis, and as a future device for commemorating and reflecting on how we experienced the pandemic.

Engaging New Audiences with Public Poetry through Broadcast, Performance and Com ...

Submitting institution: Manchester Metropolitan University
Unit of assessment: 27 - English Language and Literature
Summary impact type: Cultural
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?: No

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1. Summary of the impact

Inspired by Dame Professor Carol Ann Duffy’s Laureateship, poets in the Manchester Writing School (MWS) have led the revival of poetry in the UK as a public medium informed by a mission for equality, social justice and cultural enfranchisement. MWS poets have extended the reach and significance of contemporary poetry by engaging new audiences that include broadcast audience figures alone of over 52,000,000 since 2014, plus multiple engagements via print, online and live events. They have introduced a literary form often seen as marginal into prominent cultural spaces hitherto dominated by prose, including theatre, radio, television, concert halls and community projects. MWS poets have catalysed debates and altered perceptions of pressing social, environmental and political concerns. They have successfully re-presented canonical texts to address contemporary issues, and have influenced perceptions of the role of poetry in public discourse.

2. Underpinning research

Since the establishment of the Manchester Writing School at the university in 1998, the Poetry Research Group has built an international reputation for actively engaged, powerful contemporary public poetry in a wide range of cultural forms and domains. Through its work, contemporary poetry has been remobilised as a medium that inspires people and prompts them into reflection and action. The current Writing School, including poets such as Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Sprackland, Adam O’Riordan, Andrew McMillan, Helen Mort and Karen Solie, builds on the legacy of former colleagues, including Simon Armitage, Jeffrey Wainwright and Michael Schmidt.

Though formally and thematically diverse in their practice, these writers are united by their shared communal ethos and orientation, and their passionate commitment to a tradition of public and often collaborative work in English poetry that manifests itself in elegies, commissioned commemorations and political poems. The poets’ work in this tradition is recognised by their public prominence, and their publications on major trade poetry lists: Roberts, Sprackland and McMillan with Cape, Duffy and Solie with Picador, and Mort and O’Riordan with Chatto & Windus— all publishing houses committed to disseminating poetry among wide audiences. The capacity for contemporary poetry to function as a transformative public art is further evidenced by the ways in which these poets have responded to high-profile commissions. For example, Duffy’s employment of British demotic speech in verse forms on the page has led to work such as her ground-breaking contemporary political reimagining of Everyman for the National Theatre [1]. Roberts’ employment of half-rhymed couplets to carry contemporary dialogue and narrative has been developed through more than two decades of work on libretti and broadcast plays, culminating in his acclaimed verse drama for BBC Radio and Television about homelessness, Men Who Sleep in Cars [2]. Duffy’s work as Britain’s first female Poet Laureate and most prominent writer of commissioned public poetry—such as her acclaimed elegy The Last Post, marking the deaths of the last two British soldiers to fight in the First World War—exemplifies MWS poets’ commitment to poetry as a public art form that can challenge and change perspectives on a wide range of social and political issues [3]. This radical commitment to taking poetry ‘beyond the page’ includes McMillan’s powerful writing on homosexuality and the male body [4], Mort’s recasting of mountaineering as a feminist act [5] and Sprackland’s passionate evocation of the ecological crisis in her poetry collections and creative nonfiction [6]. All these poets have reached new audiences through broadcast, stage performance and collaboration.

4. Details of the impact

Generating new audiences for canonical poetic texts addressing contemporary issues

Building on their work addressing social and political issues, the poets in the Manchester Writing School are regularly commissioned to adapt and dramatize canonical poetic texts to resonate with contemporary cultural and political questions. Duffy’s re-telling of the fifteenth-century English morality play Everyman for the National Theatre (2015) placed the drama firmly in the context of our contemporary eco-crisis, recasting Everyman’s sin as indifference to the earth’s future. The play reached 6,266,762 people, including live theatre audiences, cinema-streamed audiences, radio listeners and YouTube viewers. Everyman also attracted younger and more diverse audiences, with increased representation from BAME communities and people with disabilities. It was acclaimed for its contemporary relevance: Michael Billington argued in The Guardian that its ‘big achievement’ was ‘to keep the framework of the original while suiting the content to a secular society’ (30.04.15) [A]. Roberts’ 2018 dramatisation of Milton’s Paradise Lost for BBC Radio 4, starring Sir Ian McKellen, was released as a commercial audiobook by Penguin. This verse drama introduced new listeners to Milton’s world torn apart by the civil war, drawing poignant contemporary parallels with divided Britain during the Brexit process. The Spectator declared that it felt ‘very much in tune with our own obsessive fears’ (31.03.18), and a review in the New Statesman announced that ‘never was a poem so needed’ (22.03.18). Roberts is committed to this ‘opening up’ of classic poetic texts: his projects also included a re-telling of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s radical feminist verse novel Aurora Leigh (BBC R4, 04.02.17), and a re-mapping of T. S. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ onto the Trafford Centre, Greater Manchester’s iconic shopping mall (BBC R4, 30.12.17). These programmes have increased the cultural capital of new audiences, informing them of not just what these texts engage with, but also why they continue to be relevant. The contemporary adaptation becomes a means for making these texts work to express or explore these audiences’ own pressing issues and concerns. Again, in the hands of the Manchester Writing School poets, poetry manifests itself as a powerful tool for democratic self-enfranchisement and emancipation [B].

Challenging and changing perceptions of social and political issues

The Manchester Writing School’s work reaches beyond poetry book readerships, and utilises wider public contexts including broadcast media, theatre, music and commemoration. As a result, they have been able to reach, inspire and mobilise new audiences, whose identities and voices have become a more established presence within these domains of public discourse. This process has afforded the poets an influential voice in debates on a range of social, political and environmental issues. Roberts’ Radio 4 and BBC4 TV verse drama Men Who Sleep in Cars (05.02.15), starring Maxine Peake, was widely critically acclaimed: The Observer declared it ‘a work of genius’ (01.10.17), and it was nominated for the UK Broadcast Awards and RTS Awards in 2018. The broadcasts achieved over 1 million engagements, raising awareness of this under-reported kind of ‘hidden homelessness’, prevalent in young and middle-aged men. Wide media (and social media) responses to the issues raised in the drama included a live national broadcast debate on BBC 5-Live’s Afternoon Edition addressing the relationship between homelessness and shame, and a feature in the Manchester Evening News (30.09.17), in which Maxine Peake used her role in the film to issue a call to action on the city’s ‘homelessness explosion’: ‘we have to show a bit of compassion and interest […] we’re only a pay packet away’ [C]. Mort’s retelling of the Medusa myth for Proper Job Theatre’s touring play reached 77,000 people. Again, the play attracted new and younger audiences from the northwest, increased awareness of sexual abuse, and gave voice to victims. It also made a positive impact on the production company and touring venues, diversifying and broadening audiences, and increasing media coverage . McMillan’s assertive invocations of sexuality and masculinity in his published poetry have informed his work with LGBT communities. Poem-lyrics for LGBT choir The Sunday Boys were created through focus-group discussions, and performed at Manchester’s Stoller Hall (29.7.18), reaching audiences of 3,383. His work affords new, young, male and northwest audiences’ access to contemporary poetry as a means of intervening in public discourse. McMillan fostered a local sense of community, bridged intergenerational divides, increased the pride and confidence of choir members, and bolstered the choir’s aspiration and ambition [D].

Helping wide audiences to mark major commemorations and celebrations

The poets’ own broadcast poetry, and their adaptations of classic poetic texts, have achieved a minimum of 52,141,311 audience engagements since 2014. Their work has increased the share of male listeners aged 15-24 by 57%; male listeners aged 35-44 by 31%; and total listeners aged 35-44 by 36%, compared to regular poetry audiences on the radio [E]. This track record has led to many new commissions designed to mark public anniversaries and events. Duffy’s ‘The Wound in Time’, commissioned by director Danny Boyle and 14-18 Now, was recited on beaches across the UK as a nationwide act of remembrance for the Armistice Centenary (11.11.18), and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, reaching an estimated 3.5 million audience engagements. It generated new audiences for poetry, increasing reach with young people, males and lower socio-economic groups. ‘The Wound in Time’ united people in a national act of remembrance at a fractious time in our recent history during the Brexit process, connecting people with their past and with each other [F]. Roberts’ collaborative and multi-media Somme commemoration in Manchester Cathedral (‘Manchester Hill Remembered’) reached a live audience of 1,069 people, with an increased reach in northwest and younger audiences. The performance increased awareness of this important event in Mancunian history: 63% of the audience had not heard of Manchester Hill prior to the event [G]. McMillan’s ‘Conversations on a Bench’ for BBC Radio 4 deployed verbatim interview material interwoven with poetry to create an elegy for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing (29.08.17). As the social media reaction indicated, the programme enabled people to articulate their grief [H]. Roberts was also commissioned by Manchester International Festival and the BBC Philharmonic to produce a choral oratorio with composer Emily Howard ( The Anvil) to commemorate the Peterloo Massacre on its bicentenary in 2019. The Anvil shed new light on this seminal historical-political anniversary. Premiered to a live audience of 1,300 at Bridgewater Hall (7.7.19), it was the centrepiece of a range of Peterloo-themed events based on Roberts’ texts for The Anvil, performed by (among others) the Irish immersive theatre group Anu in sites around Manchester, reaching a total live audience for the day of 4,200. The concert was also broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the anniversary of Peterloo (16.8.19) [I].

Re-energising poetry’s role in society

Through its work ‘beyond the page’, Manchester Writing School has been at the forefront of challenging perceptions of poetry as a marginal and arcane literary form. Through a strategy of free access and a programme of public outreach, Sprackland’s work as Chair of the online Poetry Archive since 2016 has developed new global audiences for poets reading their own poems. In 2018-19, there were 1,262,510 engagements with the Poetry Archive from across the world. A sample of 530,000 users broken down by age showed 145,000 in the 18-24 group, signalling significant reach with younger people. User feedback emphasised that the archive allows ‘Easy access to magnificent recordings to use in my classroom with the educational resources’, and it ‘enables my students to connect the written word, the spoken word, and the history and context in which the words were created’. There are over 200,000 engagements with the Poetry Archive every month [J]. Roberts’ essays for BBC Radio 4’s strand Something Understood explored ideas ranging from cultural understanding of death to the power of pervasive bodily metaphors (breath, heart, vision) in our culture. Roberts has used this platform to introduce audiences to poems by a wide range of contemporary poets. Building on its tradition of ‘widening access’ to poetry, our university has invested in a specialist Poetry Library, which is the first one to be built in England since 1968, and the first public poetry library ever to be established in a UK university. The library will provide a focus for events, engagement and residencies for the city of Manchester, the north-west and its diverse poetic communities, plus readers and performers from the UK and abroad. The Library will function as a natural, but hugely significant, development of the MWS poets’ commitment to generate new audiences through public poetry.

5. Sources to corroborate the impact

Evaluation data and testimonial corroborating the impact for Everyman (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019); Review in the Guardian corroborating critical response: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/apr/30/everyman-review-chiwetel-ejiofor-national-theatre-carol-ann-duffy-morality-play
Reviews and critical response to Michael Symmons-Roberts’ adaptation of Paradise Lost https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/of-innocence-and-experience ; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2018/03/devastatingly-milton-ian-mckellen-s-thrilling-trippy-retelling-paradise
Evaluation data corroborating the impact of Men Who Sleep in Cars (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019) and evidence of the critical response: https://www.eightengines.com/men-who-sleep-in-cars ; https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/showbiz-news/men-who-sleep-in-cars-13678015
Evaluation data and testimonial corroborating the impact of McMillan’s work with The Sunday Boys (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019)
Independent evaluation by Sally Fort (Oct 2019) corroborating audience engagement and reach of Manchester Writing School poets.
Evaluation data corroborating impact of The Wound in Time (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019)
Evaluation data corroborating the reach and significance of Manchester Hill Remembered (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019)
Evaluation data for Conversations on a Bench (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019)
Evaluation data corroborating the reach and significance of The Anvil (Sally Fort’s independent evaluation Oct 2019); Testimonial from John McGrath, Artistic Director and Chief Executive, Manchester International Festival
Poetry Archive Evaluation (Julie Blake, Poetry by Heart 2015-2016 evaluation report, April 2016); Testimonial from Robert Seatter, Chair of Poetry Archive

Gothic Place-Making: New Cultural Production, Curation and Tourism in Greater Manchester ...

Submitting institution: Manchester Metropolitan University
Unit of assessment: 27 - English Language and Literature
Summary impact type: Cultural
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?: No

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1. Summary of the impact

Through their establishment of the website Haunt Manchester and its associated network of partners, researchers in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS) have curated tourism-related digital content that received a Gold award for ‘Best Community/Business Engagement Campaign’ from Navitas Education in 2020. Haunt Manchester has been adopted by the city of Bristol, and has influenced similar heritage-based initiatives of Gothic tourism and place-making in the USA. The website is a product of MCGS’s mission to ‘make Manchester Gothic’ through a sustained programme of creative and collaborative public engagement that has stimulated the cultural life of Greater Manchester since 2013. Across the 89 research-informed events of the annual Gothic Manchester Festival (2013–19), they have initiated, produced and co-produced a multitude of new cultural offerings, including a concert with BBC Philharmonic and BBC Radio 3 at Stoller Hall, a public Gothic exhibition at the John Rylands Library and Gothic CPD courses at HOME cinema.

2. Underpinning research

MCGS is now the largest centre for Gothic studies in the world. Its research is multi-modal and thematically varied, spanning Gothic cultural production from the medieval and early modern periods through to the present day. Within the Centre’s extensive corpus of published outputs, it is possible to identify two distinct strands, both of which have directly informed its cultural impact in Greater Manchester and beyond.

The research of Foley, Liggins, Lindfield and Townshend coheres around interdisciplinary manifestations of the Gothic mode, including architecture, heritage and the built environment, soundscapes and cultural conceptualisations of haunting. Townshend’s Gothic Antiquity explores the relationship between Gothic literature and ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ Gothic architecture in the long eighteenth century, and pays sustained attention to concerns that are of direct relevance to place-making in and around Manchester, namely regionalism and nationhood; the political, religious and class-based significations of architectural style; and the development of notions of architectural ‘heritage’ from the late eighteenth century onwards [1]. Lindfield’s research on Robert Adam and the eighteenth-century Gothic Revival more generally establishes the different ways in which medieval architecture was revived in accordance with fashionable taste in the Georgian period. The research has been directly applied, via Haunt Manchester, to his outward-facing work on the city’s architectural heritage [2]. Framed by an interest in domestic architecture as a particularly gendered site of supernatural activity, Liggins’ The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories is a pioneering examination of female writers’ performative engagement with architectural space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [3]. This research has been applied to, and creatively reinterpreted within, the context of heritage sites in Greater Manchester, including the Tudor Ordsall Hall, Salford. Foley’s work on Gothic sound and soundscapes draws attention to the often-overlooked auditory dimensions of the Gothic through theorised accounts of the ‘voice’, directly inspiring new cultural production through a collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic [4].

The research of Aldana Reyes, Blake, Germaine Buckley and Ni Fhlainn variously explores modern and contemporary cultural manifestations of the Gothic and the role that it plays in mediating debates about politics, economics, identity, the body, childhood and education, nationality and gender relations. Focusing on anxieties about corporeality and identity politics, Aldana Reyes’s Body Gothic (2014) surveys numerous contemporary literary and cinematic texts that have interpreted the human body as a significant Gothic topos [5]. Blake’s co-edited collection Neoliberal Gothic addresses the ways in which Gothic literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts have interrogated, and been shaped by, the global effects of post-1980s Neoliberal economics. Ni Fhlainn’s wide-ranging Postmodern Vampires has located this seminal Gothic trope firmly within popular culture, analysing its political and economic significance in a broad range of British and American cinema and literature. Germaine Buckley’s Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic explores British and American children’s Gothic fiction and provides a theoretically innovative reinterpretation of constructions of childhood, education and children’s literacy in filmic and literary texts published since 2009 [6]. The insights of Aldana Reyes, Blake and Ni Fhlainn have been communicated to popular Gothic and Horror-cinema audiences in Greater Manchester through public lectures, film introductions and intensive CPD courses, whilst the work of Germaine Buckley has informed a variety of city-based children’s events and creative writing workshops. Taken together, the work of these researchers underlines the vitality and significance of the Gothic to contemporary cultural life in and around Manchester, in relation to film, literature, popular culture, politics, and children’s literature and education.

4. Details of the impact

Haunt: A New Mode of Gothic Tourism

In 2018, the MCGS conceptualised, founded and launched Haunt Manchester, a unique public engagement website dedicated to promoting the city’s rich Gothic past and present. In recognition of its success over the last two years, Haunt Manchester received the Gold award as ‘Best Community/Business Engagement Campaign or Initiative’ at Navitas Education’s Heist Awards in 2020. Haunt is hosted on the Visit Manchester site, the official online tourist resource for Greater Manchester that attracts 2,500,000 hits per year. Providing a platform for publicising, reviewing, disseminating and reflecting upon all manifestations of Gothic culture within Greater Manchester, Haunt is populated with accessible yet research-informed articles on the city’s Gothic architecture, heritage, haunted locales, ‘horrid histories’ and contemporary Gothic cultural events. To date, the site has received 445,000 discrete hits. Statistical analysis from Marketing Manchester also demonstrates an international reach for the site’s content, with users accessing it from Europe, the US and South America [A].

Haunt also comprises an extensive network of over 200 Manchester-based individuals, groups, organisations and cultural producers, from individual performers and artists to local SMEs, including major stakeholders CityCo & Manchester Business Improvement District and Rochdale Business Improvement District. Marketing Manchester states that Haunt has provided a new and invaluable way of attracting visitors to the city and region, changing the city’s cultural offerings and making Manchester prouder and more aware of its Gothic heritage. Haunt content has also directly increased revenue for its organisation by generating page views that have been cited in its sales pitches for new members. This, in turn, has had a further effect on Greater Manchester as a whole, as Marketing Manchester is a non-profit organisation that re-invests its income in promoting the city [A]. According to market research commissioned by Creative Tourist in 2018, at the time of Haunt’s inception Manchester was the only city to curate alternative cultural content in this fashion [B]. The Heist judges noted that this winning entry to the ‘Best Community/Business Engagement Campaign’ ‘connected popular culture to the institution’s academic offerings and community commerce. It also provided a strong link to the city and its tourism strategy. The judges especially noted the use of research related to Manchester’s heritage’ [C].

National and International Impact

Haunt’s collaborations with external partners have ensured that MCGS research remains relevant well beyond the academy. This approach is validated by the adoption of the Haunt model of Gothic tourism in other cities. Declaring that this is the direct result of the MCGS’s work in and around Manchester, the regional tourist site Destination Bristol has replicated Haunt for its ‘Visit Bristol’ site. The Haunt Bristol homepage received 10,920 hits between its launch in January 2020 and November 2020. Destination Bristol has acknowledged the importance of the site in bringing new perspectives on Bristol to the fore, attracting new audiences, advancing opportunities for local retailers and helping Destination Bristol provide content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Destination Bristol testifies that Haunt ‘has had a positive impact on us as a business by helping to build relationships with organisations and people that we previously had no contact with in the city and allowed us to promote and engage with specific attractions, retailers, events and people that previously had no obvious “fit” on the Visit Bristol website and marketing offering’ [D]. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with organisational support from partner ‘Bristol Goth and Alternative Market’, Haunt ran an online trader’s market for Bristol and Manchester in June 2020. The market aimed to support small businesses and creatives at the time of national lockdown when markets were closed across the country, giving those involved a chance to make sales and gain new followers. To demonstrate the connections between research in the Centre and the traders’ art, the MCGS provided two ‘appreciations’ of the artwork on display, which were published on Haunt and used to advertise the partners’ work. Facebook metrics demonstrate that the market event itself generated 556 responses from individual attendees (either those ‘going to’ or ‘interested in’ it), with all posts on the page generating a reach of approximately 13,000. Of those traders who sent feedback on the event, 40% stated that it was their first online market, and 71% of the traders confirmed that they made sales. Positive comments from traders included: ‘The markets I have done with Haunt and Bristol Goth Market have been the best run, best attended and most profitable out of all those we have taken part in since lockdown. I can’t think of any improvements but think other online event organisers could learn a lot from you guys’ [D]. Farther afield, the Haunt model has also directly inspired the ‘Mythic Mississippi’ project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As Professor Helaine Silverman has stated, ‘I am so impressed with what Haunt Manchester is doing as a model for integrating culture-heritage-popular culture-tourism-economic development that I am following it closely in CHAMP’s new project (“The Mythic Mississippi”) that I am co-directing in Illinois’ [D].

Making Manchester Gothic: The Gothic Manchester Festival

The success of Haunt is built on an impact strategy initiated in 2013 to ‘make Manchester Gothic’ through the public engagement work of the MCGS and The Gothic Manchester Festival. The Centre’s agenda is to unveil, celebrate and reflect critically upon the Gothic multifacetedness of Manchester, a post-industrial city hitherto better known in the public imagination for its music and sporting cultures. Launched by MCGS in October 2013, the annual Gothic Manchester Festival has foregrounded and enriched Manchester’s Gothic past and present, directly embedding MCGS research in local communities, cultures and subcultures to underline the relevance of the Gothic, past and present, to the city and its people. The MCGS is also an economic driver that brings investment into the city. For example, the Centre hosted 2018’s International Gothic Association Conference, which attracted some 300 international delegates, many of whom attended that year’s ancillary Festival of public events. As the archived material attests, each iteration of the Festival has been based on a theme that broadly reflects the research interests of MCGS . Accordingly, each programme has comprised, among other events, research-led public lectures and readings; Gothic CPD courses; walking tours; art exhibitions; dance and music concerts; and film screenings [E].

The Gothic Manchester Festival has attracted approximately 3,600 visitors to date, and its events have contributed to raising public perceptions of the city as a site of Gothic cultural significance [F]. Regularly reported in local press and radio and named as one of the Guardian’s ‘Top 10 things to do’ nationally in October 2017, it has achieved significant publicity via both traditional and social media. In 2015, the Manchester journalist, local historian and tour guide Jonathan Schofield wrote an article on Manchester’s Gothic locales, citing both the Centre and the Festival. The Festival hashtag trended on Twitter in both 2015 and 2017, while the MCGS’s closed Facebook group (1,204 followers) had 717 active members during the month-long Festival in October 2019. Together with the MCGS’s 5,477 Twitter followers, these citations and figures evidence a high level of two-way public engagement. MCGS have produced several online videos, including a series of ‘Gothic Summits’ between academic staff and cultural commentators, such as the musician John Robb. Media articles about the Festival and associated MCGS activity reached an estimated circulation of over 107,000,000 according to data from media analytics source Meltwater [G]. Highlights of the Gothic Manchester Festival include: two 8-week CPD Gothic film studies public programmes run in conjunction with HOME cinema in Manchester; co-curation of the ‘Darkness and Light: Exploring the Gothic’ exhibition at the John Rylands Library (2015; footfall of 103,965—an increase of 27,595 from the previous year in the same period); and a large-scale outdoor Gothic fashion show as part of the ‘Halloween in the City’ Festival in Manchester city centre (2017), attended by approximately 300 people. The partners on these events (Cornerhouse Arts Centre (now HOME); John Rylands Library; and CityCo) have all provided testimonials that reference the transformative effects that their collaborations with MCGS have had on these and other Festival events. As CityCo’s Event Producer has stated, ‘Manchester Met has changed the working practice of Halloween in the City’, adding that ‘working with academics has brought out and communicated what Gothic is, in an accessible way.’ The independent evaluation of the 2013–18 festivals concluded that ‘this collaborative approach has nurtured a long-lasting connection between MCGS and plural Gothic groups and organisations from Manchester and beyond’ [H].

Stimulating New Cultural Production

These partnerships have directly inspired new forms of Gothic cultural production in Manchester (art; music; dance; literature). Three particular highlights include the co-production of Scoring Fear with the BBC Philharmonic; an ongoing partnership between MCGS and the Dancehouse Theatre; and MCGS’s longstanding relationship with the Manchester Gothic Arts Group (M:GAG).

Inspired by their engagement with MCGS, the BBC Philharmonic produced Scoring Fear at the Stoller Hall in August 2018, a classical music concert comprising scores from modern and contemporary Gothic and horror cinema. The concert was programmed with MCGS and BBC Radio 3, and presented by Matthew Sweet in conversation with Dr. Matthew Foley. Attracting a public audience of 333 (86% of whom were attending Stoller Hall for the first time), Scoring Fear was also subsequently broadcast on Radio 3 as The Sound of Gothic, an episode in the popular ‘Sound of Cinema’ series that reached an estimated 152,000 listeners [I]. In 2019, Emma Liggins collaborated with the Dancehouse Theatre and Dance Company in Manchester to produce an original production called Monster Mash, an event that was conceptualised around the Festival theme of ‘Gothic Hybridities’ (130 tickets sold). Responding to the annual themes of the Gothic Manchester Festival, artists affiliated with M:GAG have produced new, original artworks that have been publicly exhibited in the city since 2013. The ongoing relationship between MCGS and M:GAG is illustrative of the Centre’s commitment to nurturing and supporting local cultural producers at all levels. Matt Carson of M:GAG has provided evidence of the value of this collaboration: ‘I’ve started thinking of MMU in terms of a patron really, because they commission exhibitions from us and have done for many years, and that’s really supported our growth as an arts group, both in opportunities to produce work and exhibit, introduction to potential buyers, and all that kind of stuff . . . That kind of opportunity to grow as artists also keeps us alive, keeps us working . . . and allows us to grow our group’. In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, the 2020 edition of M:GAG’s exhibition was offered entirely online, utilising the digital presence of the award-winning Haunt Manchester website [J].

Linguistics in Action: informing and improving airport security, police negotiation, ...

Submitting institution: Manchester Metropolitan University
Unit of assessment: 27 - English Language and Literature
Summary impact type: Societal
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?: No

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1. Summary of the impact

Professor Dawn Archer specialises in deciphering how language is used to influence, manipulate and deceive. She has used her expertise to train more than 150 European Air Marshals, who protect in excess of 5,000,000 passengers passing through European airports each year. Training for 27 police negotiators has led to linguistic techniques being incorporated into their daily practice, and to the ongoing development of a language-focused toolkit for current and future operational UK police negotiators. Her parliamentary work has led to her being consulted on the spelling of ‘anti-Semitism’ in Lords Hansard Official Debates, bolstering their style guide practices. Her expertise has also been noted for influencing the conception and production of True Crime documentary programming. Her media appearances and press coverage have an estimated combined circulation of 981,828,907, exposing new audiences to an empirically validated understanding of the linguistic markers of deception and its detection.

2. Underpinning research

In collaboration with the Emotional Intelligence Academy (EIA) Group, Archer’s work on deception and its detection is underpinned by the development of two empirically validated analysis systems for uncovering deception. SCAn-R is a real-time analysis system that considers cues across six verbal and non-verbal communicative channels. SCAnS is a semi-automated version of SCAn-R that pioneers the use of corpus linguistic tools to make the analysis more reliable and effective. This work improves on current, predominantly psychological, models of deception detection by focusing on the combined power of linguistic, behavioural and physiological indices. By focusing on mismatches in what a speaker says, their baseline interactional style, and what their body language and other physiological signs communicate, users can identify persons of interest and then test the hypothesis that they are engaging in deception [1]. Prior to this work, the role of deceptive language had hardly been addressed at all, especially in contexts such as European airports, and no empirically validated tools for analysing suspects’ verbal output had been proposed. Archer and her colleagues introduced pioneering ways of using corpus linguistic tools (where permissible), in addition to improving upon currently available verbal elicitation techniques. Archer has demonstrated, for instance, how small talk can be employed as a covert elicitation technique to catch out suspected ‘persons of interest’ in airport contexts, while being perceived by genuine passengers as innocuous ‘chit-chat’ [2].

Archer’s work on crisis negotiation is underpinned by a set of original concepts, including the ‘reality paradigm’, which designates a whole range of cognitive filters through which we perceive and interpret the world [3]. Archer has demonstrated that by homing in on what subjects say and how they say it, negotiators can familiarise themselves with a subject’s reality paradigm, and hence more easily secure common ground by tailoring their own speech to the situation at hand. She has also demonstrated how pragmatic techniques can be employed by negotiators to deliver their message more effectively while, importantly, avoiding further conflict. For instance, she advocates the use of ‘face-enhancing’ techniques, including the affirmation of subjects’ positive actions/decisions and honesty, and has demonstrated how such language builds rapport and trust in high-stake crisis negotiation scenarios [4].

Archer’s parliamentary work highlights the importance of linguistic analysis in formally describing how House of Lords and Commons speakers negotiate their political differences. She has introduced novel ways of combining linguistic analysis and corpus linguistic tools to uncover pragmatic phenomena in Hansard Official Debates and has demonstrated how such an approach can successfully disclose implicit meaning. Applying these methods, she has revealed, for instance, how speakers make subtle pragmatic choices, such as veiling their intended meaning in superficial politeness, and using impression management strategies to avoid being reprimanded and censored for using ‘unparliamentary language’, while clearly conveying their intentions nevertheless [5, 6].

4. Details of the impact

Keeping Airports Safe

Archer’s collaboration with the EIA Group saw the development, delivery and evaluation of training for European Air Marshals and Behavioural Detection Officers (BDOs) as part of ARMLET (2016 and 2017), a pan-European project that attracted a EUR1,600,000 grant from the EU’s ‘Prevention of and Fight Against Crime Programme’. Two cohorts of European Air Marshalls were trained in Romania to use the SCAn-R system. The Training Coordinator for the ARMLET programme notes that this novel approach ‘significantly improved [security personnel’s] ability to analyse behaviour, making them more effective at their job, whilst also prioritising (and maximising) the safety’ of the ‘24,000 passengers/civilians that pass through [the Romanian] airport each day. In 2018 alone, this totalled 5,077,693 passengers’. The training was promoted ‘as a standard for training programs dedicated to Air Marshal and BDO operators’, and has since been ‘integrated [...] into current training and operations at the airport as well as work with Diplomatic partners’. In-house trainers have subsequently instructed ‘an additional 116 Air Marshals/BDOs from seven EU member states’ in use of the SCAn-R system. The Training Coordinator remarks that the airports that engaged with, and benefitted from, the guidance ‘now have a reliable internal procedure in place for helping people to detect suspicious behaviour’ [A]. The Managing Director of the EIA Group notes that, following SCAn-R training, Air Marshals could ‘correctly identify persons of interest 87% of the time - a significant increase from around 40% pre-training’. The training also helped to ‘significantly reduce the false-positive rate […] resulting in better time and human resource management, reduced inconvenience to genuine passengers, and shorter wait times when going through security checks.’ The team have now been ‘approached by other European airport security agencies in Germany, France, Belgium and Poland’ and work is underway ‘to extend [the] training programme across Europe’ [B].

Changing Police Negotiator Practices

Based on her work on negotiation and influence, Archer developed and delivered CPD training (‘ Negotiating Influence’) in 2016 for 27 locally-based UK Police Negotiators. A senior representative of Greater Manchester’s Police’s (GMP) Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit (HCNU), states that, prior to this, ‘negotiator training had been based on a psychology-driven approach of behavioural change’ and that Archer’s training ‘provided novel insight into how language can be used in crisis negotiation scenarios and was a welcome addition to standardised training’ [C]. Feedback obtained from a post-training questionnaire indicated that the experienced negotiators taking part in the training viewed it as both innovative and valuable. Attendees indicated that ‘I was initially trained as a negotiator in 2005. I don’t recall any learning involving linguistics as part of our training. Most negotiator training revolves around psychology and behavioural interpretation not language in my view’ and that the guidance allowed them to develop ‘a deeper understanding about why [subjects] may be using’ the words and structures that they do [D]. This CPD work led to Archer’s ongoing collaboration with the National Negotiation Group (NNG), which includes the development of a ‘Police Negotiator’s Toolkit’ that prioritises linguistic techniques matched to specific incident-types, such as barricades, sieges and suicide intervention. As the Assistant Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police notes, ‘it is the first time that training has been looked at and refreshed in this way for a long time’. The research conducted was judged to be ‘high-quality, rigorous and scientifically based’. In a testimony, the Assistant Commissioner commends Professor Archer’s ‘genuine passion for negotiation, compassion for others and saving lives’ [E]. Comments from three focus groups (based on the Report written for the NNG and prototype training materials) were also especially positive. Contributors signalled the importance of being able ‘to apply some science to what we do, particularly if some things are shown to work better in different scenarios’. It was noted that ‘by having a better-informed understanding of the nature of language and the way in which it can affect a subject's mood/belief/action’, negotiators ‘can be better prepared to negotiate more effectively’ [D].

Informing Government Record-keeping Practices

Archer’s Hansard-related work attracted the attention of the Editor of Lords Hansard, John Vice, in 2017. Following a claim from a pressure group that certain variants of the contentious term ‘anti-Semitism’ can legitimise ‘a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification’, and hence ‘jeopardi[se] [the] political impartiality’ of Hansard, Vice deemed it ‘vital […] to assess the validity of this claim and, if necessary, take action to correct it’. Archer was therefore asked, alongside PhD student Oliver Delgram-Nejad, to determine the different connotations of eight variants based on frequency-of-use versus neutrality-of-use. The research used corpus linguistic techniques (including determining the verbal ‘company’ each variant keeps in texts) to analyse data taken from electronic news outlets, social media platforms, politically-focused websites, and other sources. Vice notes that the ensuing report ‘enabled me to walk with some assurance this awkward and potentially fraught line between spelling and politics, and to push back against the lobby group with the knowledge that our current style is not obviously problematic. Her authoritative research was a crucial point of stability in a potentially fraught area’. Vice additionally noted that his ‘style guide team’ developed ‘a more mature awareness of the sensitivities of their decisions’. The Lords Hansard team was, therefore, confident to continue using its original formulation, with the additional bonus of gaining a fuller and more rounded understanding of the sensitivities and complexities involved. [F].

Engaging the Public and Influencing True Crime TV Production Practices

Archer appears regularly on television as ‘the Listener’ on Faking It: Tears of a Crime (Series 1-4, 2017-2020) and has served as a communications expert on a three-part Beverley Allitt special ( The Beverley Allitt Tapes) , broadcast by Sky Crime (02/08/2020). She has also contributed widely to radio discussion of linguistics, most notably on BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth. Archer’s analysis for these popular programmes calls on her research insights based upon using linguistic and paralinguistic ‘points of interest’ from ‘multi-channel’ communication, in order to identify possible deception in taped interviews with murder suspects and high-profile subjects of legal action. During the latter part of 2020, Archer also contributed to a TV special, covering ‘Prince Andrew, Maxwell and Epstein’ for Discovery Plus UK, as well as two special editions of Faking It, covering ‘Saville’ and ‘Trump’.

Steve Anderson (Shearwater Productions Ltd.), producer of Faking It, notes that the first two-part series ‘broke Investigation Discovery UK’s viewing records’ and that ‘Series 2 Episode 2 alone attracted 209,000 viewers’. Series 4 Episode 1 (aired 12/09/2020) attracted 280,137 viewers: it was also Quest Red’s most watched programme on replay (on 14/09/2020) [G]. Anderson states the following about Professor Archer’s role in the programme:

‘As “The Listener”, her expertise was used to analyse the speech of those suspected of serious crimes - predominantly murder. She studied videotapes and other footage of bogus appeals recorded by TV News bulletins to identify words, phrases and patterns in speech that may point to potential guilt. In doing so, she was able to introduce the public to complicated linguistic topics and explain them in accessible terms. Throughout the series, Professor Archer educated the public on how language can be used to identify dishonest people. The educational value was made clear by comments left across social media platforms. On Professor Archer’s Twitter account, for example, we can read the following: “It is a pleasure observing how you can infer lies from the audio tapes of criminal

interviews. I never noticed how significant pauses were until I watched your segment in

#FakingIt …It is a case of not taking any…tone/words with a pinch of salt. Brilliant stuff”’ [G].

Other social media commenters point out that they became aware of how significant pauses, tone and words can be, and that Archer’s guidance is ‘good to use every day’. A third indicated their plan to put into practice what they had learnt in their viewing by ‘testing [it] out […] at school’ [H].

Katie McDougall (Woodcut Media), producer of The Beverley Allitt Tapes, points out that ‘a large part of my concept [...] was to have a communication expert look at original interview recordings done under police caution’. She ‘became aware of Archer’s work having listened to her appearance on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth’ [I]. McDougall notes that Archer’s input ‘was invaluable’ and ‘helped shape my understanding of the language used by [Allitt]’. Furthermore, Archer ‘was able to go above and beyond’ in her analyses and ‘the amount of knowledge and additional content she brought to the project […] influenced my approach to developing the concept for the screen and had a strong impact on how I went about filming the series’ [I]. Currently, cumulative viewing figures for The Beverley Allitt Tapes stand at 217,286 . As of 12/09/2020, Archer has appeared in programmes reaching an estimated 2,660,523 viewers (excluding repeats) to demonstrate how linguistic analysis can be put into practice to analyse the verbal behaviour of individuals suspected of deception [J].

Archer’s radio work includes appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth to discuss the linguistic indicators of lying, as well as appearances on BBC Radio Leeds and BBC Radio Merseyside to discuss linguistic deception associated with specific crimes/locations. Archer’s appearance on Word of Mouth stemmed from the producers being ‘particularly interested in [Archer’s] work on lying’, having ‘really enjoyed [her] contribution on Faking It: Tears of a Crime’ [K]. Word of Mouth: Lying, alone, reached an estimated 6,560,000 listeners [J]. Because ‘the response to the programme [was] fantastic’, Archer was subsequently commissioned to write a feature that Word of Mouth used to ‘promote the programme heavily’ [K]. Archer’s work has also featured in magazine and newspaper articles where she has been asked to comment on deceptive language more generally. As of 12/09/2020, these articles had an aggregated potential circulation of 971,621,383 [J].

'Viddying with Fresh Glazzies': Promoting New Public and Creative Engagement with ...

Submitting institution: Manchester Metropolitan University
Unit of assessment: 27 - English Language and Literature
Summary impact type: Cultural
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?: No

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1. Summary of the impact

Research on Anthony Burgess by Professor Andrew Biswell and Dr Paul Wake has created new worldwide audiences for the novelist’s publications, making them available in countries where they had been censored, with translations into Maltese, Chinese, Malay, Turkish and Romanian appearing for the first time. Biswell is the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, which has revived and significantly broadened the cultural appeal of the writer’s legacy among twenty-first-century audiences and artists extending public and creative engagement well beyond A Clockwork Orange (1962) . The research has stimulated the proliferation of new cultural productions across various genres and media, including theatrical performances, films, music and public artworks. As a result of this work by Biswell and Wake, the annual royalty income of the Burgess Estate rose by over 70%, from GBP149,970 (2014) to GBP255,585 (2018) with new works, broadcasts and events reaching a global audience of over 980,000.

2. Underpinning research

Biswell’s and Wake’s research is centred on the Burgess archives and an ambitious editorial project supported by a university press, and underpinned by three interconnected aims: discovery, dissemination and innovation. A long-term commitment to these goals was confirmed by the secondment of Biswell, who remains a full Professor at the university, to the Directorship of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in 2010.

Biswell’s The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (2005) has influenced and enlivened public perception of the writer’s legacy well beyond the academy. Based on extensive archival research and more than 200 interviews with Burgess’s friends, editors and peers, this biography traced the trajectory of Burgess’s life for the first time and revealed a fully rounded portrait of a notoriously self-concealing writer. It sold more than 6,000 copies and received widespread critical acclaim: it was named as a Guardian Book of the Year in 2005 and was awarded the Portico Prize for North-West Book of the Year in 2006 [1]. A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition (2012) was equally ground-breaking in revisiting Burgess’s iconic novel. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication, Biswell’s newly edited text includes an introduction, explanatory notes, an expanded Nadsat glossary and critical essays. The introduction demonstrates the depth of Burgess’s knowledge of dystopian literature and positions him as a linguistic pioneer within the genre. Biswell’s annotations illustrate previously overlooked aspects of the text, such as the creative misquotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Penguin has sold more than 61,000 copies in paperback since December 2013 [2].

Conceived, guided and co-ordinated by Biswell and Wake, the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess (2017–) is an ongoing project, published by Manchester University Press. This first scholarly edition of Burgess’s novels and non-fiction (including stage plays, film scripts, letters, audio-visual archives and notebooks) aims to restore ‘lost’ writing to the canon of the writer’s already available works. Drawing on original research in diasporic archives located in Manchester, Austin (Texas), Angers (France), Hamilton (Ontario) and Caen (Normandy), the edition establishes Burgess’s significance within the twentieth-century canon by relating his work to that of other prominent literary figures, such as Shakespeare, Hopkins, James Joyce, John Keats and J. G. Ballard, as well as artistic media (music halls, silent cinemas and photography). The Irwell Edition has also crystallised and reinforced the author’s cultural significance for Manchester—his place of birth—by including novels set in the city, such as A Vision of Battlements (1965) and The Pianoplayers (1986), and incorporating appendices that demonstrate and document the writer’s rootedness in the city. Bringing together a panel of international experts, the edition targets a global readership by purposefully reconfiguring Burgess as a cosmopolitan writer whose creative vision encompassed places such as Gibraltar ( A Vision of Battlements, edited by Biswell in 2017) [3], New York ( Puma, edited by Wake in 2018) [4] and Italy ( ABBA ABBA, 2019). Other volumes in the Irwell Edition, such as The Pianoplayers (2017) and This Man and Music (2020), focus attention on Burgess as a musician [5].

Obscenity and the Arts (2018), a cross-disciplinary collaboration with the graphic designer Adam Griffiths and feminist critic Germaine Greer, provides an innovative examination of Burgess’s writing and lecturing on literary censorship. Edited and introduced by Biswell, the volume explores Burgess’s struggle with censorship in Malta between 1968 and 1974. It is presented as a montage of biographical narrative, lecture text, feminist response, documentary photography and new artwork, and constitutes a valuable excavation of a little-known period in Burgess’s life [6].

4. Details of the impact

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF) has generated significant economic impact and subsequent investment in the arts. The IABF has also curated new national and international cultural production, reinvigorated the celebration, commemoration and critical reappraisal of Burgess’s legacy across diverse audiences, platforms and locales, and contributed to our understanding of literature’s impact on national and local identity.

Economic impact and investment in the arts

As a result of the publications produced by Biswell and Wake, including translations, the annual royalty income of the Burgess Estate rose by over 70%, from GBP149,970 (2014) to GBP255,585 (2018). The success of this publishing strategy is evidenced by the fact that new editions of Burgess’s work have led to sales of 301,628 since 2014, including translations of Biswell’s 2012 edition of A Clockwork Orange [A]. In addition to generating significant income, this work has made an outstanding contribution to the cultural ecology of the city and the region.

Seconded to the IABF as director and CEO since July 2010, Biswell has established it as one of the premier live literature venues in Manchester, hosting more than 200 cultural events in 2019 alone. Under Biswell's artistic direction, the Burgess Foundation presents an illustrious series of book launches and literature readings, concerts, film screenings, archive tours and public exhibitions. Attendance at these events is consistently strong, with estimated audiences of more than 35,000 at the venue from 2013 to 2019. The IABF’s long-standing partnerships with the Observer newspaper and the Guardian Media Group provide opportunities for new and emerging writers associated with the IABF to be published and mentored by industry professionals. The Foundation carries out partnership events with external organisations such as the National Portrait Gallery, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Random House, Carcanet Press, Comma, Faber and Faber, Penguin Classics, Manchester Central Library, Chetham’s Library, Kino Film Festival, the Manchester Comedy Festival and the Manchester Science Festival. Since 2011, the Foundation has been the main hub venue for the annual Manchester Literature Festival [A].

The growing interest in Burgess among non-academic audiences is evidenced by the decision of BBC Radio 3 to feature his work in a series of broadcasts since 2012. In 2017 Biswell was the consultant for five BBC radio essays, curating talks on morality, colonialism, class, criticism and language. Biswell also advised on the first radio production of Oedipus the King (1972), translated and adapted by Burgess. Listener numbers evidence the success of these broadcasts: the former attracted 49,000 listeners per programme (245,000 listeners in total); the latter attracted 76,000 listeners [A]. The current reappraisal of Burgess’s cultural legacy is most clearly demonstrated by the new appreciation of his work as a musician. Radio 3 broadcasts include a two-hour edition of Saturday Classics (2017), written and presented by Biswell, which examined musical influences on Burgess (with an audience of 145,000), and an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (2017), which featured music composed by Burgess and re-scored for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The latter was recorded before a live audience of 406 at the Middleton Hall in Hull and the broadcast reached an audience of 70,000 listeners. On 22/3/20, the BBC broadcast Burgess’s ‘lost’ play Schreber, featuring Christopher Eccleston. Biswell discovered this unpublished play, based on one of Freud’s case histories, in the IABF archives. The radio drama was selected by the Observer as one of its cultural highlights of the week [A]. Following the Coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, new online exhibitions curated by the IABF have included ‘Portraits of Anthony Burgess’, ‘Burgess on Tape’, ‘The Music of Anthony Burgess’, ‘Banned Books’ and ‘Burgess and the Atomic Age’. Collectively, these online exhibitions have received 15,220 hits, demonstrating the popularity and importance of the Burgess Foundation’s digital presence [A].

New cultural production

Biswell’s and Wake’s work has directly stimulated new cultural production incorporating writing, film, music, theatre and visual art. In 2017, the Manchester International Festival commissioned No End to Enderby, a pair of artists’ films by Stephen Sutcliffe and Graham Eatough, adapted from two novels by Burgess. The artists explained how Biswell’s research had been influential in creating the films: ‘ The Real Life of Anthony Burgess was a primary reference point for us in creating No End to Enderby […] It provided an invaluable background to Burgess’s life from which we were able to create our central characters [… ] Throughout the pre- and post-production of our films we consulted with Andrew to support our ideas and creative process, and in order to have access to a wider context to our understanding of Burgess and his works. These conversations formed an important part of our application to the Contemporary Arts Society’s annual award in association with the Whitworth Gallery, which we won in 2015’. These films received the GBP40,000 Contemporary Art Society Award and were exhibited at the Whitworth Art Gallery (2017) and the Glasgow International Festival (2018), where they attracted 95,195 visitors. Biswell participated in public discussions with the artists as part of the Manchester and Glasgow festival programmes and contributed an introduction to an illustrated book of storyboards, based on the two films, published by Lux in 2020 and marketed to visual artists and curators [B].

In the same year, the IABF and the Manchester International Festival jointly commissioned Raymond Yiu to compose The World Was Once All Miracle, a song-cycle based on six Burgess poems. The inaugural performance by the BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hall attracted a live audience of 2,341, in addition to a worldwide Radio 3 audience of approximately 169,000; a second performance at the Barbican Hall in London generated audience numbers of 1,943 (live audience) and approximately 108,000 (Radio 3 audience). Yiu commented that ‘[the] International Anthony Burgess Foundation has played a vital part in the becoming of the composition… they gave me informed and enlightening guidance in navigating the labyrinth of materials – both in-house as well as from other Burgess archives in other parts of the world – in order to choose the most suitable ones for my composition. Without their help, it would have been otherwise an extremely daunting task’ [C].

Further evidence of encouraging new cultural production is provided by the writer Adam Roberts, who in 2018 collaborated with Biswell to produce a new novel, The Black Prince, based on an unpublished Burgess film script. Roberts writes: ‘I re-read Biswell’s The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, by way of positioning myself with respect to a “Burgess”-y creative praxis: not just producing pastiche, but trying to understand what Burgess was trying to do, mimicking his methods of writing […] Prof. Biswell was supportive and helpful, read the first draft of the completed novel and assisted in several ways with the publication process. After publication he staged a public conversation in Manchester at which he and I discussed Burgess as a novelist and talked about the new novel’ [D].

In 2018, the Liverpool Everyman Theatre presented a stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. The production showcased a new score by Burgess that had been discovered by Biswell in the IABF archive. Many of the audience (4,560 over 21 performances) were young people who had never previously visited the theatre [E]. In November 2019, The Burgess Foundation hosted ‘Conversations with the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archive’, a performance of new experimental sound art, created in response to materials assembled by Biswell from the Burgess audio archive. Participants explained how the archive had shaped their compositions in a series of publicly available podcasts. Contributing artist Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, discussed how the project brought together his interest in analogue technology, hauntology, archives and experimental performance. Dr Alan Dunn, the curator of the project, spoke about the significance of bringing archives into connection with creative practice, thereby ‘keeping them contemporary, getting artists to re-work them, [and] find nuances that perhaps a historian or archivist might not recognise’ [F].

National and local identity

At a national level, the contemporary reappraisal of Burgess’s reputation in response to the work of the IABF is underlined by the presence of A Clockwork Orange on the OCR A-level syllabus of texts recommended for Comparative and Contextual Study since 2017. This indicates the extent to which Burgess’s writing has become part of the urgent ongoing debate about how the twentieth-century canon should be configured for contemporary readers of school and college age. In 2020, demonstrating the increased national interest in Burgess’s legacy, Biswell was asked to contribute to the submission for a Blue Plaque installation at Burgess’s 1960s residence in Chiswick [G].

At a local level, the work of Biswell and Wake has significantly raised the profile of Burgess within Manchester. Margaret Drabble, delivering the 2019 Anthony Burgess Lecture, commented that: ‘After a bohemian and adventurous life, much of which was spent abroad, Burgess has been claimed by his own city, Manchester’ [H]. A mural of Burgess in the city, created by the street artist Tankpetrol in Manchester’s Northern Quarter for the 2016 Cities of Hope Festival, is now a local landmark. Google searching for website and blog responses to this mural alone brings up 429 national and international hits. This public artwork demonstrates both the Burgess Foundation’s impact on the emerging stature of Burgess in the city of his birth, and the ways in which his reinvigorated reputation continues to provoke new creative work from a variety of contemporary artists [I].

Increased international audiences and reputation

Burgess’s reputation as an international figure has been greatly enhanced by Biswell’s and Wake’s work. During the period of evaluation, articles on Burgess appeared in at least 33 countries, reaching an estimated circulation of over 1,600,000 million [J]. Obscenity and the Arts, published in 2018, examines the question of Burgess’s reputation in Malta, where his books were banned and 50 titles from his private library confiscated by the authorities. The publication of this book has led directly to a new focus on Burgess in the Maltese media, and the first Maltese theatre production of A Clockwork Orange, which was staged in November 2019. Reviewing this production, which was aimed at school-age audiences aged 14+, the Times of Malta wrote: ‘ Larinġa Mekkanika was a fast-paced, intense adaptation which was faithful to Burgess’s vision and final message […] It also facilitates the necessary understanding that free will is an essential aspect of our very flawed, but very genuine, humanity’ [K]. The repercussions of the IABF’s international reach are demonstrated by the writer’s prominence in Manchester’s successful bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2018. The UNESCO City of Literature website emphasises the significance of Burgess and his legacy to the city of Manchester [L].

5. Sources to corroborate the impact

Evidence to corroborate the impact of Biswell’s Directorship of the IABF including financial records, testimony from Literary Agent, RAJAR data, statements from IABF on financial records and attendance figures, Observer article, further corroboration available via contact details in submission system.
Testimonial from artists Graham Eatough and Stephen Sutcliffe corroborating the impact of their work with Biswell on No End to Enderby https://lux.org.uk/writing/lux-publication-no-end-to-enderby
Testimonial from composer Raymond Yiu corroborating the impact of work with Biswell on The World Was Once All Miracle; Guardian review: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/06/the-world-was-once-all-miracle-review-anthony-burgess-symphony-raymond-yiu-song-cycle-manchester
Testimonial from writer Adam Roberts; Nielsen figures for The Black Prince
Audience data and programme from Everyman Theatre, Liverpool corroborating reach of stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.
Anthony Burgess Cassette Archive interview podcasts: https://www.mmu.ac.uk/artshumanities/rah/podcast/
OCR, AS and A Level English Literature, H472 (2019); https://chiswickcalendar.co.uk/anthony-burgess-blue-plaque-bid/
‘The 2019 Anthony Burgess Lecture: Margaret Drabble’, 10/10/19. Public lecture delivered at the IABF, Manchester, audio file.
Tankpetrol Mural; blog responses corroborating Burgess’ impact in Manchester.
Meltwater media circulation data corroborating continued global reach of Burgess.
Giulia Xuereb, ‘Like Clockwork . . . Rewind’, Malta Independent, 10/10/17; review by André Delicata in Times of Malta, 26/11/19, corroborating impact of international reach and significance.
UNESCO City of Literature website corroborating centrality of Anthony Burgess to Manchester UNESCO City of Literature status.

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