Luke Kennard, Anna Metcalfe and Bohdan Piasecki wrote poems and a microplay for a new collection of works celebrating Birmingham’s 35 branch libraries.
Three academics from the Department of Film and Creative Writing have contributed to a new ‘protest zine’ alongside dozens of other renowned authors and poets, including Jonathan Coe, Mark Billingham and Kit de Waal.
Luke Kennard, Anna Metcalfe and Bohdan Piasecki have each written about one of Birmingham’s 35 branch libraries for ‘Brum Library Zine’, which aims to rally people in support of Birmingham’s libraries that are facing multimillion-pound cuts.
Luke Kennard and Bohdan Piasecki’s short poems celebrate the diverse people as much as the books of Mere Green and Perry Common libraries, and Anna Metcalfe’s two-page microplay set in Selly Oak library imagines a showdown between two children over a copy of Owl Babies.
The idea for the zine came from poet Liz Berry, who put a call out to writers with connections to Birmingham to visit a library and then write something while they were there. A crowdfunder raised £1,000 to pay for the design and print of 2,000 copies of the zine, which are available for free at Birmingham’s libraries. Berry hopes they will inspire more people to join the Birmingham Loves Libraries campaign.
I was approached by the legendary Black Country poet Liz Berry and was honoured to be asked to contribute a poem. The local library where I grew up in Luton was so important to me, and the thought of communities around Birmingham being denied access to something so basic, enriching and foundational feels catastrophic in a country that is supposedly the 6th largest economy in the world. Spending half a day at Mere Green library, meeting some of the staff and finding a space to write something felt like a very small but significant way of contributing to the protest against the cuts. It was chilling imagining the space without its library, which was absolutely thriving on the day I visited.
Professor of Creative Writing
Biographical and contact information for Dr Luke Kennard, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.
Assistant Professor
Biographical and contact information for Dr Bohdan Piasecki, Assistant professor in Contemporary Writing at the University of Birmingham.
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing
Biographical and contact information for Dr Anna Metcalfe, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing at the University of Birmingham.
