Creative quartet secure regional backing

Four writers have secured regional investment to develop creative projects exploring North East culture, identity and heritage over the next six months.

New Writing North, working with Live Theatre and Tyneside Cinema, has appointed four creative associates through the North East Mayoral Strategic Combined Authority’s Create Talent programme.

The projects range from an exploration of the region’s underground rave movement to a feature film about an Iranian immigrant navigating the asylum system in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Actor and writer Christina Berriman Dawson has been appointed Live Theatre’s writer-in-residence, where she will develop RAW.

Drawing on a radical underground free party movement based in Newcastle and Northumberland, the project will use rave culture to explore community, freedom, identity and politics, as well as the impact of the 1994 Criminal Justice legislation on the movement.

British-Iranian writer-director Johnny Massahi, from Newcastle, has been named Tyneside Cinema’s screenwriter-in-residence.

He will use the residency to complete his debut feature film, currently titled Iranian Pornographer, which follows the asylum struggle of an Iranian immigrant in the North East in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

As the central character is pushed into underground employment as a pornographer, his grip on reality gradually begins to unravel.

The project will give Massahi the opportunity to further develop the film over the six-month programme, drawing on his perspective as a British-Iranian filmmaker based in the region.

Meanwhile, Newcastle poet Ilisha Thiru Purcell has been selected as one of two New Writing North writers-in-residence.

Her project will mark 70 years since the birth of writer Julia Darling and just over 20 years since her death, with Purcell producing a sequence of poems and facilitating workshops responding to Darling’s work.

Finally, Northumberland-based writer and artist Stevie Ronnie has also joined New Writing North as a writer-in-residence.

Working across sculpture, painting, poetry and installation, Ronnie will develop and pilot a new approach to publishing artist book editions of short-form fiction.

The project will bring writers directly into the design and production process, exploring how the physical form and materials of a book can influence, and be influenced by, the writing it contains.

The four creative associates will develop their respective projects during six-month residencies, with the investment designed to support new writing rooted in the region and provide creative talent with opportunities to develop new work.

Sarra Scougall, skills project manager at the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority, said: “We are proud to fund New Writing North’s Creative Associates programme as part of our Create Talent programme, helping talented writers across the North East develop their creative practice, bring new ideas to life and contribute to our thriving creative sector.”

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