A festival to grow up with...
The Manchester Children’s Book Festival was devised by Professor Carol Ann Duffy DBE when she was made Poet Laureate in 2009.
From 2010 to 2017 we worked with most of the city’s cultural organisations and many national and international partners to engage around 10,000 children, young people and families annually.
With a legacy of projects, competitions and pilots that have engaged thousands of children, families, teachers and writers, we decided, in 2017, to take a break from delivering our annual programme, instead putting our resources into building relationships with local inner-city communities and schools.
The opening of the Manchester Poetry Library provides opportunities for us to grow what has been a central strand of all of our activities over the years, Children’s Poetry. MCBF looks forward to some exciting collaborations for families and children.
During the summer of 2020, ambitious plans for a big summer community event to help launch the Manchester Poetry Library ‘MCBF does Poetry in the Park’, which would have brought families from inner-city Manchester communities into Manchester Met University grounds for the first time since 2017 for a celebration of children’s poetry, had to be postponed.
So Carol Ann Duffy wrote to publishers to ask if they would help us support our local communities by providing books for children whose parents might not be able to afford to buy them. Our friends at Macmillan, Penguin, Scholastic and Hachette kids were incredibly generous and we were able to gift almost 2000 books to families via schools, libraries, charities and food banks in our #BigBookGiveaway.
We continue to work with publishers and their writers/illustrators and have also delivered many ad-hoc events and school visits, including with authors such as Chris Riddell, Katie Thistleton, David Baddiel, Alex Wheatle as well as many other poets and writers.
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The Manchester Children's Book Festival is organised and run by the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University – and many of the Festival’s events take place on the university campus.
MCBF is a key project for the university, providing a platform for collaboration with external partners from across the city and beyond and opportunities for our students to develop their skills through engagement in the Festival's volunteer and placement programmes.
The Manchester Writing School and RAH (Research in Arts & Humanities), working with MCBF, often host events that may be of interest to teachers, librarians and writers. These are advertised via Twitter and are listed on our MCBF website.