As I’m typing this, Nottingham’s bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature is being electronically submitted to UNESCO UK, who, if they decide to support it, will send the bid to UNESCO’s director-general next week. On our City of Literature website we’ve published a long letter from the city’s great and good (University Vice-Chancellors, MPs, a rich array of civic and business leaders), demonstrating their support of the bid. It’s been a busy year, and a particularly hectic last few days, in which we rewrote the bid in the light of a helpful review of the initial draft from UNESCO UK. I’m proud of the the bid we’ve written, which, I believe, represents the city’s thriving literature scene and creative infrastructure in an…

Dawn of the Unread is an interactive graphic novel aimed at celebrating Nottingham’s literary heritage and encouraging literacy in the city’s schools. There have been thirteen issues so far, each eight pages long, featuring such diverse authors as Alan Sillitoe, Mary Howitt and DH Lawrence, along with even more diverse writers, from Michael Eaton to Nicola Monagahan and Alison Moore to Al Needham. Artists have included Brick, who I’ve often collaborated with and the brilliant Eddie (‘From Hell’) Campbell. The fourteenth comes out this weekend. It’s online now, with a couple of embeds still to be added. I wrote it, and Ella Joyce, daughter of author Graham Joyce – who was going to write one of the stories before his untimely death – has illustrated…

Time for my annual reading blog. Spent most of the last week above the clouds, at the edge of the El Teide national park in Tenerife. The photo above was taken just below the space observatory there, near the volcano that is the highest point in Spain. The clouds are so close that sometimes it feels like you can walk out onto them (see first photo). But when you find yourself driving through then, they become dull, wet mist. We didn’t take any CDs for our hire car, or I would have been playing my Calexico collection to death: felt like we were driving through a Western movie. I associate Tenerife with overbuilt resorts, and on our drive back to the airport we passed some…

My colleague, the talented fantasy novelist, Graham Joyce, died last year, and I helped clear his office (which we shared with Georgina Lock) a few weeks ago. There’s an event celebrating his life and work this Saturday, at 11am, as part of the States of Independence independent publishers festival in Leicester, which is always an interesting day. Graham was a true independent: free thinking, irascible on occasion, inspiring and, most of all, an original. I was, for a few years – technically – his line manager on the MA in Creative Writing that I used to run and still teach on. Graham preferred the word ‘boss’ and, boy, did he hate all bosses. We had our differences, but they had long dissolved into mutual warmth…

  Yesterday we launched Nottingham’s attempt to become accredited as a Unesco City of Literature. I chair the board of the company set up to do this, which is a great honour, and a pretty daunting job. It was an even bigger honour to be asked to speak at the launch of Nottingham’s newest tram, named after the great Alan Sillitoe. Many of the guests at the launch were able to attend the naming ceremony at the Forest tram stop, chosen for the spot’s significance in Alan’s work. When we were done, we took the tram into the market square for the launch event at the Council House. 5.30 was too early for some, but there will be video of the whole event on the…