Rainy City Stories

Manchester is a city made of stories – some have long been forgotten, some have never been told and some have yet to be written. The 2008 Manchester Literature Festival announces the launch of the Rainy City Stories project, a new website which invites readers to engage with their city in a new way, opening up a hidden landscape of fact and fiction.

Rainy City Stories employs the latest open-source technology to publish new writing set in the city of Manchester. It uses a Google map of the city to organise stories linked to particular places. Readers can click on a place marked by the little cloud icon to read a piece of writing associated with that spot.

The website goes live October 9 as part of the 2008 Manchester Literature Festival. To start things off, they’ve commissioned works from some of the city’s best and brightest authors including Jackie Kay, Mike Duff, Nicholas Royle and Rajeev Balasubramanyam. We will be publishing more commissioned work in 2009, and expanding our site to include audio and video readings and illustrations to accompany the words.

After the site launches, anyone will be able to submit their own short stories, poems or bits of memoir for inclusion on our literary map of the city. We’re expecting work from some of the students in Manchester’s prestigious writing schools, from the city’s talented pool of literary bloggers and from people who might not have had an outlet for their writing before.  For more information about how to send us writing, please visit the Rainy City Stories website.

A series of related writing workshops and a live literature event featuring some of the Rainy City Stories writers will be part of the 2009 Manchester Literature Festival. The project is funded by Arts Council England.

You can also follow Rainy City Stories on Twitter.