Featured image: Design: Bradley Sansom. Photography: Susie Wilson, Monique Roffey, Carson Wolfe

The Manchester Writing School is a thriving centre of creative excellence and one of the UK’s biggest and most successful literary centres. Led by Dame Carol Ann Duffy (Poet Laureate 2009–2019), alumni include winners of the Costa First Novel Award, the Forward Poetry Prize and the Yale Windham-Campbell Prize. To celebrate its significant role in supporting Manchester’s global representation as a UNESCO City of Literature, we round up the writers to watch in 2024.

Carson Wolfe

Carson Wolfe is an award-winning Mancunian poet and Master of Fine Arts Poetry student at the Manchester Writing School. A teaching assistant on the writing course ‘Poems That Don’t Suck,’ Carson is working on their second collection with Forward Prize winner and poet Kim Moore. Their first poetry collection Boy(ish) Vest (2022) won the Northern Debut Award for Poetry and can be found in the Manchester Poetry Library.

Susie Wilson

Susie Wilson is an award-winning Scottish poet and graduate of the Manchester Writing School. Crowned winner of the 2024 Disabled Poets Prize in the Unpublished Pamphlet category, her collection of poems focuses on her struggles with autism and melanoma. Susie’s pamphlet Nowhere Near as Safe as a Snake In Bed will be published in November 2024.

Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British author, a professor of Literature at the Manchester Writing School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her accolades include the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (2013) and the Costa Book of the Year award (2020). Her most recent book Passiontide (2024) follows the story of four women on a Caribbean island who spark a revolution demanding justice after a fellow female is murdered.

Zodwa Nyoni

Zodwa Nyoni is a Zimbabwean poet, playwright and lecturer at the Manchester Writing School. Her film The Ancestors (2023), funded by BBC Films and the British Film Institute, was released in Hollywood in February 2024 at the Los Angeles Black Film Festival. The film follows three Zimbabwean ancestors who descend to Earth to connect with the living and ensure their cultures are not forgotten. Nyoni is also a screenwriter for the cult Netflix anime series Castlevania: Nocturne (2023–present). Look out for Season 2 later this year.

Andrew Michael Hurley

Andrew Michael Hurley is an award-winning British writer and a lecturer at the Manchester Writing School. His novel Starve Acre (2019) has been adapted into a film, supported by the BBC and the British Film Institute. The film follows an archeologist as he investigates the mythic folklore surrounding an ancient oak tree, while dark forces invade his life. Featuring a star-studded cast including Matt Smith (Doctor Who) and Morfydd Clark (The Lord of the Rings), this folk horror was recently released in cinemas.

Charlotte Shevchenko-Knight

Charlotte Shevchenko-Knight is a poet of Ukrainian and British heritage, currently studying for a PhD at Manchester Writing School. In 2021, her pamphlet Ways of Healing was a recipient of the New Poets Prize. Her debut collection Food for the Dead has been shortlisted for the highly prestigious 2024 Forward Prizes for Poetry, in the Best First Collection category. The anthology explores the ongoing war in Ukraine through a socio-historical and deeply personal lens.

April Yee

April Yee is a writer, critic and winner of the 2023 Manchester Writing Competition’s Fiction Prize for her short story, Still Blue Thing. This impactful piece of work explored her experience of pregnancy as a woman of colour. Across her breadth of journalism, essays, poetry and fiction work, Yee captures the issues that currently pervade society through her own unique point of view. On accepting her recent £10,000 prize award, Yee shared that the prize money will “enable [her] to craft more stories”.

Andrew McMillan

Professor Andrew McMillan is a senior lecturer of contemporary writing at the Manchester Writing School. His poetry collections, physical and playtime, were met with literary acclaim, with physical voted one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years. McMillan’s debut fiction novel Pity is set across three generations of a mining family in Yorkshire and following its release this year, has been reviewed highly by the BBC and The New York Times, and featured in The Sunday Times’ Best Books of 2024. The novel is a lament of a lost way of life, but also a celebration of resilience and change.