We provide advice and guidance to the overseas offices of the British Council on a wide range of types of literature activity including writers' visits and tours. These activities take many forms, including: festivals, conferences, seminars, workshops, writing residencies, online creative writing schemes and also favour a reader centred approach through Reader Development initiatives. We aim to cover all types of writing: the novel, the short story, poetry, drama, performance poetry, crime fiction, literary biography, science fiction, popular science writing, travel writing, writing for children, screenwriting, literary translation and storytelling.

Hay Segovia
For the third consecutive year British Council Spain was delighted to collaborate in the Hay Festival Segovia supporting the talks with writers Robert Minhinnick, Owen Sheers, Gillian Clarke, Michael Morpurgo and the filmmaker Nick Broomfield.

Power in the Voice - the regional final
Young people from Africa and the UK wowed audiences in Botswana with their vocal skills at the closing festival and regional final of our three-year programme, Power in the Voice.

Am I Writing Rubbish
An exciting new competition took place at the 2008 Jaipur Literature Festival in India. Challengingly and comically entitled ‘Am I Writing Rubbish?’ this was a joint venture between the British Council and Oxford Bookstores in India.

Animating Literature: East Asia Performance poetry workshops
These took place in Malaysia and Singapore in November 2006, followed by more performances in 2007. Poets Roger Robinson, Francesca Beard and Aoife Mannix contributed.

Power in the Voice
This series of events includes residencies by performance poets, creative writing workshops, rap/performance poetry competitions in schools, Voice Fairs, book exhibitions, production of DVDs, radio and TV performances, taking place in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, Mauritius, Malawi and the UK.

Radiophonics
The aim of the Radiophonics creative writing workshops is to generate stories, suitable for radio broadcast across Africa, relating to social issues, to inform debate and discussion.

Magic Pencil
An exhibition of children's book illustration currently touring around the world. It is also available as a facsimile exhibition, has a printed bibliography (all the books listed are included on the children's section of enCompassCulture) and a dvd of animated films by some of the illustrators.

Please see our Literature News page for more information on current events.