 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
The Arvon Foundation is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom that promotes creative writing. Arvon is one of Arts Council England's National Portfolio Organisations. [1]
Andrew Kidd is the Chief Executive Officer, Patricia Cumper is Chair of the board of trustees. [2]
Arvon was founded in 1968 by two young poets, John Fairfax and John Moat. [3] It runs residential writing courses at writing houses in three rural locations: Totleigh Barton, a 16th-century manor house in Devon; The Hurst, a manor house in Shropshire, which formerly belonged to the playwright John Osborne; and the former home of Ted Hughes, Lumb Bank, a 17th-century mill-owner's house hear Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. [4]
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic the organisation established Arvon at Home, an online offering of courses. Due to its success, Arvon at Home is now considered a permanent "fourth house." [5]
The courses and writing retreats, some open to all-comers, others specially organised with schools or partner charities, provide space and time to practise writing with guidance from published authors. The charity also operates grant scheme for low-income writers. [6]
Ruth Borthwick was Chief Executive and Artistic Director from 2009 to 2019. She was succeeded by Andrew Kidd, a former publisher of Picador and managing director of Aitken Alexander Associates and co-founder and chair of the Rathbones Folio Prize. [7]
Each of the writing houses has its own director, [2] while Richard Haseldine is the CFO and Operations Director.
Its national office was formerly at Free Word, a centre for literature, literacy and free expression in Farringdon, London. Free Word closed in May 2021 with its resident organisations, including Arvon, vacating. [8] As of June 2021, Arvon's national office is based out of Clerkenwell Workshops. [9] Its registered office is now its Lumb Bank location. [10]
The Arvon Foundation previously ran the biennial Arvon International Poetry Competition, which was first judged in 1980 by Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin. In 2010 the judges were Carol Ann Duffy, Elaine Feinstein and Sudeep Sen.
Susan Mary Woodford-Hollick, Baroness Hollick OBE is a British businesswoman and consultant with a wide-ranging involvement in broadcasting and the arts. A former investigative journalist, she worked for many years in television, where her roles included producer/director of World in Action for Granada TV and founding commissioning editor of Multicultural Programmes for Channel Four. As a campaigner for human rights, world health, literacy, and the arts, she serves as trustee or patron of a range of charities and foundations. She is founder and co-director of Bringing up Baby Ltd, a childcare company. Other causes and organisations with which she is associated include the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), the Leader's Quest Foundation, Complicité theatre company, Reprieve, the Free Word Centre. the Runnymede Trust and the SI Leeds Literary Prize. Of English and Trinidadian heritage, she is the wife of Clive Hollick, Baron Hollick, with whom she has three daughters.
Romesh Gunesekera FRSL is a Sri Lankan-born British author, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Reef in 1994. He has judged a number of literary prizes and was Chair of the judges of Commonwealth Short Story Prize competition for 2015.
John Murray is an English writer and novelist known for writing satirical novels on a range of subjects. He read Sanskrit at University College, Oxford.
Frances Pinter was the founder and executive director of Knowledge Unlatched, a (then) not-for-profit company creating a global library consortium enabling sustainable open access academic book publishing. She was also the CEO of Manchester University Press from 2013-2016.
Elise Valmorbida is an Italian Australian writer and creative writing tutor who lives in London, England.
Founded in 1921, English PEN is one of the world's first non-governmental organisations and among the first international bodies advocating for human rights. English PEN was the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers' association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The President of English PEN is Margaret Busby, succeeding Philippe Sands in April 2023. The Director is Daniel Gorman. The Chair is Ruth Borthwick.
Ursula Margaret Owen Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and campaigner for free expression.
Free Word was an international centre for literature, literacy and free expression based at 60 Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, London. It developed local, national and international collaborations that explored the transformative power of words.
Andrew Cowan is an English novelist and former director of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia.
The Quarto Group is a global illustrated book publishing group founded in 1976. It is domiciled in the United States and listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Henry Edward Sutton is a crime novelist. The author of nine works of fiction including My Criminal World (2013) and Get Me Out of Here (2011), he teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he is a Senior Lecturer and the co-director of the Master of Arts in Prose Fiction UEA Creative Writing Course. In 2004, he won the J.B.Priestley Award.
Bare Lit Festival is an annual literature festival featuring writers of colour held in London, England. It takes place over two days every Spring. It was founded in 2016 by Samantha Asumadu, Mend Mariwany, Henna Zamurd-Butt and Samira Sawlani. The event is notable as the UK's first crowdfunded festival to take place, raising over £7700 by 291 individual supporters. Additionally, according to The Guardian, the festival was the first in the UK to focus on minority writers.
The Literary Consultancy (TLC) is a UK-based editorial consultancy service that was founded in 1996, becoming the first service of its kind to offer "professional, in-depth editorial advice and assessment to anyone writing in the English language, anywhere in the world". Operating under the strapline "Literary Values in a Digital Age", TLC is based at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon Road, central London. Its founding Director was Rebecca Swift, who set up the organisation with Hannah Griffiths after they worked together at Virago Press.
Thomas Peter Usborne was a British publisher. In the early 1960s, Usborne co-founded the satirical magazine Private Eye. In 1973 he founded the children's book publisher Usborne Publishing.
Moniack Mhor is a creative writing centre in Scotland. Based in the Scottish Highlands, Moniack Mhor is fourteen miles from Inverness. The centre is a registered charity and is supported by Creative Scotland.
Rebecca Swift was a British poet and essayist. She was co-founder in 1996 of The Literary Consultancy.
The RSL Christopher Bland Prize was inaugurated by the Royal Society of Literature to encourage the work of older writers. It is awarded annually to an author of a fiction or non-fiction book who was first published when aged 50 or over. The prize is valued at £10,000 and was launched in September 2018. It is named in recognition of Sir Christopher Bland, who was 76 when his first novel was published.
Ruth Borthwick, Hon. FRSL, is a British arts administrator, literature executive and educator, who for more than three decades has worked with writers in bookselling and publishing, and as an advocate for literature in the UK and internationally. In 2018, she was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Society of Literature, rewarding "significant contribution to the advancement of literature". Formerly chief executive and artistic director of the Arvon Foundation for ten years (2009–2019), she has been Chair of English PEN since 2021.
Andrew Kidd Hon. FRSL, is a British publisher, who has served as the CEO of the Arvon Foundation since 2019. He co-founded the Folio Prize in 2014, and serves as its chair. In 2023, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
