Executive Summary

Writers from Leeds whose work helps to define and profile the city include Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison, Keith Waterhouse and Kay Mellor, alongside contemporary writers such as Caryl Phillips, Rommi Smith, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Adam Lowe, Louise Rennison, and Jacob Ross.  

Leeds and West Yorkshire are home to a wide range of interesting and dynamic publishers, small-scale literary producers, activists, and organisers who champion literature and writing as accessible art forms able to engage with a wide range of people of all ages, whether through Simon Armitage and Mayor Tracy Brabin’s West Yorkshire Young Poet Laureate Programme engaging children in poetry across West Yorkshire or Peepal Tree Press’ Inscribe programme supporting the next generation of writers of colour in Leeds.  

With Leeds Libraries Service offering over 30 front doors into literature in all parts of the city, and with 300,000 library card holders engaging with the service, the art form of reading for pleasure has a much wider impact than is currently acknowledged and there is a great deal of opportunity to build on this and to engage with local ‘levelling up’ agendas.  

Leeds is also a burgeoning centre for media production, with Channel 4, independent production companies, universities and colleges, and Screen Yorkshire supporting talent, business development and location facilities. The North’s literary culture also gives back, by giving us words with which to celebrate our people and region, and by broadcasting the stories and voices of the North to the world.  

Underpinning the writing-focused creative industries in Leeds is a strong infrastructure of university provision in the field of creative writing and practice, which provides many new creative writing graduates each year.  

Leeds has recently attracted inward investment from BookTrust, a national literature organisation, which has made the city its new headquarters and is busy growing a new team drawn from across West Yorkshire. The Arvon Foundation has also moved its headquarters to its base at Lumb Bank in Heptonstall where it is undertaking significant capital development.  

Literature has a key role to play in the Creative Health and Wellbeing agenda, as there is a growing recognition and understanding of the benefits that reading and writing can bring to mental health, health literacy and wellbeing. This agenda is of interest at local, regional and national government level and opportunities exist to pursue investment alongside innovation. Leeds Libraries recognise this and are delivering nationally significant partnership programmes with the health sector. There is an opportunity for writers to be trained to work in this context, and for Leeds to take a leading role in developing expertise for local writers. Harnessing the imagination and skills of writers to shape and deliver new programmes for the wellbeing benefit of citizens requires partnership-building. The city has the writers and infrastructure to deliver this work, it requires leadership to make it happen.  

The government’s new Creative Industries Sector Vision, published in June 2023, recognises the importance of creative people and creative jobs, offering a vision for how the creative sector can contribute positively to the growth of the UK economy. The introduction by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak specifically mentions the development of the British Library North project. The writing industries and the skills that writers, publishers and producers bring to enable growth and opportunity are not always well grasped due to the mixed funding of much literature activity. We offer a case study of The Gallows Pole in this report to demonstrate how publicly funded literature can be positively exploited to bring rich rewards to a region.  

Regionally, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority already demonstrates a high regard for culture, supporting regional cities to manifest year of culture events and with Mayoral support for poetry development programmes. Harnessing and uniting the interdependencies of the subsidised and commercial creative industries in the fields of writing will be key to a thriving culture.  

There is much to celebrate and build on in the city, but this report also identifies some challenges that can be addressed. The impact of the pandemic has cast a long shadow in some areas, reducing communication and affecting the informal networking and access to finance that enabled some parts of the sector to thrive. There has been a loss of some activities and ways of working that need to now be rebuilt.  

Although cultural ‘levelling up’ has brought welcome new organisations and developments of scale to the North and to Leeds, it has perhaps not yet fully benefitted those already running the grassroots organic activities that form the foundations on which the rest is built.  

We found that the thriving local literature ecology in Leeds is not sustainably supported or acknowledged as the lynchpin that it is. Investment in writers and in literary leadership is needed to ensure that access and opportunities for all are available to underpin the city’s ambitions.  

With the new arrivals, new developments, existing talent and geographical location, Leeds is well placed to become a major centre for literature. Work is needed to align current assets and strategy to support new developments, while continuing to support an exciting and committed but fragile literature ecology.