With contributions from: Romalyn Ante, Raef Boylan, Amanda Dalton, Olga Dermott-Bond, Petra Ganglbauer, Aysar Ghassan, Emilie Lauren Jones Dušica Karaić Victoria Kennefick, Sun Lei, Olga Igumnova Lawson, Marcin Niewirowicz, Andrea Mbarushimana, Susan MacNeil, David Morley #narrandobo: Leonardo Bianconi, Leo Merati & Giulia Quadrelli, Peter Raynard, Sarah Ammajou Rehm, Antony Owen, Tanya Shirley, Mihajlo žilović.
Coventry was the first city in the world to formally ‘twin’ itself with another when it twinned with Volgograd in Russia in the midst of the Second World War in 1944. This extraordinary act of civic, international friendship was only the beginning of Coventry’s unique twin-city story. Throughout the twentieth century, Coventry continued to twin with other cities, making connection and friendship with a total of twenty-six cities around the world.
The Twin Cities of Friendship postcard project, commissioned for BBC Contains Strong Language festival of poetry and a part of Coventry City of Culture 2021, explored the legacy of this by connecting twenty poets – ten from Coventry and the local region and ten from Coventry’s Twin Cities. Throughout the summer of 2021, postcards designed by Coventry artists criss-crossed the globe, bearing messages and questions – What is the weather like where you are? Who are your city’s notable figures? What are your favourite buildings or places? Finally, we asked each poet to write a poem that resulted from their exchange and to share these poems as an act of friendship with each other and their cities.
This book, To Coventry by Sun, brings together all the poems and artwork commissioned as part of this international project. BBC Contains Strong Language 2021 is a partnership between the BBC, Coventry City of Culture Trust, Writing West Midlands and Nine Arches Press, and is supported by Arts Council England, the British Council, Creative Lives and Jerwood Arts.
About the Author :
Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017, she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019, Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15,000 people over three nights as part of a music, poetry and light installation.
