Developing tolerance of diversity was the by no means unambitious aim we set ourselves for our 'new writing' work in Slovenia. The brand new Literature Corner in the British Council Ljubljana office and our innovative, Slovene creative writing anthology make up the backbone of the project, which started in September 2003.

Mark Haddon’s story of an intelligent, autistic teenager investigating the murder of a dog, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and Monica Ali’s hugely popular first novel, Brick Lane, are just two of the titles which can be found among the hundreds in our Literature Corner. Made up of British novels published in the last ten years, our collection offers a range of books with a huge variety of styles and subjects.

Similarly encompassing a wide range of styles and subjects, our hotly anticipated creative writing anthology will be published on 12 October. The anthology, based loosely on the British Council anthology New Writing 12, brings a broad range of quality new fiction to the Slovene reader. It explores such complex issues as diverse communities, sexual orientation and gender as they are portrayed in UK writing, and facilitates intercultural reflection in a quest to develop more global perspectives in our readers. Our anthology has a joint Slovene-English editorship which unites Diran Adebayo, a New Writing 12 co-editor, with Polona Glavan and Mirina Drev, who both attended last year's British Council Cambridge Literature seminar.

Diran Adebayo, hailed as one of the most original young literary talents of his generation, visited Slovenia in December 2003, to add an element of 'Live Lit' to the project. He spoke to audiences of more than 300 on contemporary writing and issues of race and participated in a round table discussion with leading Slovene writers and publishers.

A reading group makes up another strand of the ‘live’ part of our new writing project. The group meets every fortnight to discuss writing published in the New Writing anthologies and other popular texts, such as extracts from Atonement by Ian McEwan. This lively discussion is not confined to within the walls of our British Council office: study notes and discussion points stimulated by the meetings are available on the British Council Slovenia website, available for anyone to download and debate. Reading group discussions are complemented by visits from lecturers, writers, poets and editors, who all representatives of different aspects of diversity. For example, Donal McLaughlin covered Scottish and Irish writing from the perspective of a writer born in Northern Ireland and living in Scotland. These visitors reap the rewards of the reading group in the form of a well-prepared audience with lots of thought-through, interesting questions.

We are also reaching out to schools in Slovenia through our students programme, which focuses on special readings for secondary and university students. With the permission of the visiting writer, extracts from their work are distributed to teachers in schools and universities with supporting notes. This way, students can get to know the writer and the text in advance, so that they can be brought to life with the visit.

In another live visit, Professor John McRae from the University of Nottingham and co-author of The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing whisked his audiences through major writers, genres and developments over the past 40 years.

Looking beyond the book, we explored the links between literature, film and tolerance through the short-story My Son the Fanatic by Hanif Kureishi. Our suggestions for classroom work in time for the Hanif Kureishi retrospective at the Ljubljana International Film Festival allowed over 600 students to compare the short story with the film and explore the two media. One piece of feedback said: 'For the English teachers in Slovenia it is very important to stay in touch with the modern British literature, on one hand, and tolerance, which is a very important issue among secondary school students, on the other hand. Literature seems to be the right thing to make students think about this important issue and talk about it without any nationalistic connotation. The last being unfortunately, something we, as a society, do not know how to deal with.'

Building on the success of the Kureishi project, we are working with a group of teachers to develop more classroom materials to develop cultural awareness and explore aspects of citizenship. These materials will be based on contemporary UK writing and address relevant issues as Slovenia adjusts to a more multicultural society as a new member of the European Union.

Most recently we have offered a literary translation workshop which was based on contemporary Scottish writing that has already been translated into Slovene. With both the author of the work and its translator in situ, this workshop provided opportunities to translate the writing back into English and then into Slovene again and stimulated lively discussion about the realities of literary translation.

Animating Literature is not just keeping our Arts team busy, but has brought together our ELT, Education and Information Centre activities in a cross-sectoral, integrated team using face-to-face, publishing and e-service tools. An example of our e-service tools is our monthly literature e-newsletter which publicises the event and contains news about the 'hottest' books, authors and websites.

And we have by no means finished. Future plans involve more readings and more creative writing events, which will be crowned by a final poetry/short story competition for students around diversity topics. Animating Literature in Slovenia will keep growing!

Danila Beloglavec is the ELT Project Manager for the British Council in Ljubljana, Slovenia.