Liverpool Screen School

Writing on the Wall (WOW) festival is an annual programme of events culminating in an annual festival that features local writers, artists, historians, musicians and historians. The festival has in the past played host to a string of acclaimed thinkers and writers, such as Noam Chomsky, Roddy Doyle and Howard Marks.

The WOW festival celebrates writing, diversity, tolerance, story telling and humour through controversy, inquiry and debate, and aims to engage young people, schools, local communities and broader audiences.

The festival originated in 2000 as a Millennium Project funded by LJMU, and maintains close links with staff in the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts’ Centre for Writing.

Professor Jenny Newman, Reader in the Centre for Writing, is the Artistic Director of the festival.

This year, the festival will launch an anthology of poetry by the late Dr Edmund Cusick, formerly head of Imaginative Writing at LJMU.

The festival will also feature a reading by Jim Friel, a novelist and full-time member of LJMU teaching staff, and will also host a launch event for the latest issue of  In the Red, a magazine that is compiled and published by LJMU students.

In 2006, Rachel Bowman, an LJMU MA Writing student, won the festival’s Pulp Fiction competition for the best new writer in Liverpool.

Irvine Welsh, the renowned author of Trainspotting and Filth said:  'There isn't another writing festival in England as good as Writing on the Wall'.