Writing Liverpool

Beryl Bainbridge, Clive Barker, Terence Davies, and J. G. Farrell represent only a handful of the fascinating and provocative writers who have emerged from the Liverpool literary scene in the past seventy-five years. Published in commemoration of Liverpool’s 800th birthday in 2007 and in celebration of its status as a European City of Culture in 2008, Writing Liverpool presents a selection of essays and interviews with the filmmakers, journalists, cultural critics, and novelists who have called the city home—asking if there is a distinctive Liverpool voice, and if so, how we identify it.

Scousers believe they live in a special place, one that has more in common with Salvador da Bahia, New Orleans or Gdansk than anywhere in England, and the city has always punched above its weight. In less than a hundred years, however, Liverpool's image has declined from a major mercantile player known as the Second City of the Empire to what some social commentators have described as a cultural backwater remembered largely as the place where the Beatles were born. In Liverpool: The Hurricane Port, Andrew Lees reveals how Liverpool's pre-eminence in the slave trade left an indelible scar on the psychogeography of the city. He also explores the roots of Liverpool's contrary nature, its rebelliousness and its hedonism, as well as some of the recent hurricanes that have battered the city, including the anger of Toxteth, the Hillsborough disaster and the murder of James Bulger. In this distinctly personal account, Lees defines the characteristics of this Celtic enclave, with her loudmouthed, big-hearted people who have created a city quite different from anywhere else in the world.

Bluecoat is a unique and much-loved Liverpool institution, its oldest city centre building. This book tells the fascinating story of its transformation from charity school to contemporary arts centre, the UK's first. Its early 18th century origins shed light on the religious and maritime mercantile environment of the growing port, whose merchants supported the school. Echoes from then are revealed in themes explored by artists in the 20th century, including slavery and colonial legacies. The predominant focus is on an inclusive building for the arts, starting with colourful bohemian society, the Sandon, who established an artistic colony in 1907, hosting significant exhibitions by the Post-Impressionists and many leading modern British artists. Bluecoat Society of Arts emerged as the building's custodians, paving the way for the arts centre which, despite financial struggles and wartime bomb damage, survived and continues to play a prominent role in Liverpool's and the UK's culture. Bluecoat is described as where 'village hall meets the avant-garde'. In its rich story, Picasso, Stravinsky, Yoko Ono, Captain Beefheart, Simon Rattle and the inspirational Fanny Calder are just some of the names encountered, as key strands, including music, visual art, performance and the building's tenants, are traced.

This fascinating collection of photographs and stories traces the ways in which The Beatles' home town has changed over the past 50 years.

Outside of the capital London, no other British city has attracted more film-makers than Liverpool. Sometimes standing in for London, New York, Chicago, Paris, Rome or Moscow, and sometimes playing itself – or a version of its own past in Beatles biopics – Liverpool is an adaptable filmic backdrop that has attracted film-makers to its ports for decades. A place of passion, humour and pride, Liverpool evokes caverns and cathedrals, ferries and football grounds; it is a city so vivid we see it clearly even if we’ve never been there. From the earliest makers of moving images – among them the Mitchell & Kenyon film company, the Lumière brothers and pioneering early cinematographer Claude Friese-Greene – who preserved the city, the river, the docks, the streets and the people, Liverpool has endured as a cinematic destination. This collection celebrates that survival instinct and will be welcomed by enthusiasts of British cities, films and culture.

Creative Writing is a complete writing course that will jump-start your writing and guide you through your first steps towards publication. Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers’ groups or writers working alone, this book offers: a practical and inspiring section on the creative process, showing you how to stimulate your creativity and use your memory and experience in inventive ways in-depth coverage of the most popular forms of writing, in extended sections on fiction, poetry and life writing, including biography and autobiography, giving you practice in all three forms so that you might discover and develop your particular strengths a sensible, up-to-date guide to going public, to help you to edit your work to a professional standard and to identify and approach suitable publishers a distinctive collection of exciting exercises, spread throughout the workbook to spark your imagination and increase your technical flexibility and control a substantial array of illuminating readings, bringing together extracts from contemporary and classic writings in order to demonstrate a range of techniques that you can use or adapt in your own work. Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings presents a unique opportunity to benefit from the advice and experience of a team of published authors who have also taught successful writing courses at a wide range of institutions, helping large numbers of new writers to develop their talents as well as their abilities to evaluate and polish their work to professional standards. These institutions include Lancaster University and the University of East Anglia, renowned as consistent producers of published writers.

A baby blown out of an upstairs window by a WWII bomb lives to hear others tell the tale… A woman embarks on a long-term obsession with a city landmark, abandoning her lover for the Liver… A bricklayer working on the foundations of a never-built cathedral becomes its evangelist, its full splendour soaring only in his mind… Bringing together fiction from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Set against key historical moments from the Second World War to the Capital of Culture year, these stories question what ‘belonging’ and ‘home’ mean in the Liverpudlian context, from the regenerated city centre to satellite suburbs, from the sparring cathedrals to the no-go concrete housing estates. Liverpool emerges in these short stories as a city in constant flux: haunted by ghosts, buoyed up by myths, and shifting with an ebb and flow like the Mersey itself. "A literary gem that will share a niche in my library with M.R. James and E. F. Benson..." - Metapsychology online Read review. "Words thrive here, carried on the saline breeze of the Mersey and twisted round agile tongues into sentences as resilient as the sandstone blocks in the Town Hall walls..." - The Liverpool Daily Post, 11 Jul 08 Read review.

Liverpool has been the birthplace or home to literally hundreds of extraordinary men and women. In this book Christine Dawe features a great many of them - from all eras and walks of life. Locally noteworthy figures, such as Kitty Wilkinson, who started the first public wash-houses in the city, Father Nugent, who rescued hundreds of starving orphans after the Irish Potato Famine, and Teddy Dance, who played a grand piano outside Marks & Spencers for many years and raised over £16,356,000 for Cancer Research, appear alongside some of the more famous faces from the past, including Rex Harrison and Bessie Braddock, as well as more contemporary figures, such as Ken Dodd, Cilla Black, Carla Lane, Ricky Tomlinson and Sir Simon Rattle. This book contains more than a hundred mini-biographies of Liverpool's famous sons and daughters - all of whom are illustrated. A perfect souvenir for visitors to the city, this is also essential reading for Liverpudlians everywhere, and is sure to appeal to those wanting to know more about these people's contributions to the great city we know today.