The Portico Prize for Literature and The Portico Prize for Young Writers

                 The Zochonis Charitable Trust

We’ve always worked hard on the Portico Prize but this year it’s particularly important to do the very best we can because for the first time ever we caught the attention of Arts Council England! The idea of a Northern literary prize was mooted around AC offices and when they discovered that we had been running such a literary prize for more than 25 years the logical next step for them was to come and chat to us about it and to see how they could help! Well, after a few more emails and phone calls the lovely Steven May and Alison Boyle told us that the AC were prepared to help us out to the tune of £20,000 for this year’s Prize – turning two £4,000 prizes (one for fiction and one for non-fiction) into two £10,000 prizes! Of course, this could not have led to such a wonderful development had it not been for the equally lovely Sir John Zochonis – a long-time member of The Portico and, better still, a huge supporter of the Library and its ambitions. Sir John so kindly added £25,000 to the Arts Council support, thereby allowing us to take The Portico Prize for Literature and The Portico Prize for Young Writers (running concurrently this year) to greater heights than ever before.

Like the Arts Council, we are hugely enthusiastic that we should work with other Northern partners and we quickly set about doing what we could to achieve this. More meetings - this time with Kay Easson, the Librarian at Newcastle Lit & Phil, Geoffrey Forster, Librarian at The Leeds Library, Sherry Ashworth, our Writer-in-Residence, Donna Lisa Healy, photographer for Newcastle Lit & Phil’s Creative Passions exhibition (celebrating literature in Portraits and Words – fantastic!). More conversations – by phone, email, across crowded rooms with our friends at Manchester Metropolitan University (Creative Writing School and Manchester Children’s Book Festival) University of Chester, Leeds University, Manchester Literature Festival, Northumbria University – the list goes on – and it looks like we’re on the verge of creating an Isosceles Triangle of Cross Pennine Partners – beginning to look like this:

The shapes could get more interesting as we forge ahead!

Confirmed judges for this years Portico Prize for Literature include:
Kay Easson, Librarian at Newcastle Lit & Phil
Michael E. Rose, Emeritus Professor of History, Manchester University
Stuart Maconie, TV & radio presenter, journalist, columnist and author

Author events – related to The Portico Prize past, present and future – are being planned as we speak and our Night of Crime in February (which featured two Northern authors, Ann Cleeves (Durham) and David Jackson (Liverpool), as well as M. R. Hall (South Wales)) was the start.  Workshops and photography projects are all in planning stages and we shall keep followers updated with progress in these pages, on Facebook, Twitter and our website.