“Regional writing does not have the pedigree here that it does in America, which honours writers from the South. In the UK, I am considered strange, this exotic girl from the North who is told she is avant-garde because she is writing about the country.”

Cumbrian writer Sarah Hall talks turkey about her inclusion in Granta magazine’s epoch-defining, reputation-making Top 20. Read more >> and listen to an excerpt from her novel-in-progress.

Ebooks, Kindles, iPads – technology is transforming the way we write and the way books are published. But in the rush to grasp the digital future are we being too quick to throw away the rich heritage of ‘real’ books and the printed word?

This new exhibition about to open at Egremont’s Florence Mine Arts Centre celebrates 5,000 years of the written word and warns against relying too much on swanky graphics and thousands of pixels. Read more >>

At the end of last year, poet Andrew Forster took a month out from his job at the Wordsworth Trust to take up a fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, a very special ‘retreat’ for witers in Midlothian, near Edinburgh.

Up to five writers at a time observe a rule of silence between 9.30am and 6.30pm and knuckle down to some serious creative production. Read more >>

She spent some of her teens in Bowness (on Windermere), and now Judy Brown makes a happy return to Cumbria as the Wordsworth Trust’s latest Poet in Residence.

Reviewing her book Loudness, Douglas Houston declared: “Brown writes with an unflappable detachment that focuses from a useful distance on whatever she chooses, be it getting the sack, drunkenness, macro-economics, or the candidly unsatisfactory erotic encounters that are equably written off against experience in various poems [...]” Read more >>