Creative Climates Leicester

Delighted to share the results of the short story competition that we were involved in organising, along with the Centre for New Writing and the Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability... Some fabulous entries, must say. http://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2024/02/nature-environment-and-sustainability.html

The University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability jointly sponsored a short fiction / creative non-fiction competition for East Midlands writers on the theme of "Nature, Environment, Sustainability." The competition looked for compelling writing that fires the imagination, and allows room for hope. It was otherwise an open brief: fiction in any genre, or creative non-fiction in the form of personal essay, memoir, feature journalism, travel or a hybrid of forms. The competition's shortlistees were offered a masterclass with the judge, The Guardian 's "Country Diary" writer and author of thirteen books about the UK environment, leading naturalist Mark Cocker (here he is, with some moth friends). The winner and runners up will appear at a showcase event with Mark during the annual free Literary Leicester festival on Thursday March 21st 4-5.15pm. To book a free ticket, go to the ticket site HER...

This pilot project was kindly funded by the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies .  The project allowed us to: Invite a number of local arts organisations to discuss a future project "Creative Climates: Creatively Communicating the Environmental Crisis", which will commission art in a variety of forms, based on local environmental research, and run a social science audiences response project alongside. This will look at ways for the arts better to participate in effecgively communicating the environmental crisis to help invoke pro-environmental bevaviour. Create this blogsite as a home for the future project. Invite artist Lucy Stevens and spoken-word artist John Berkavitch to join the meeting, and then freely choose how they wished to interpret the project’s themes. Lucy picked a current scientific investigation into Leicester air pollution. John responded by thinking more generally about our current predicament.   The art is currently being exhibited in the ground floor...