Arts Council funding for literature rises 9.9% amid the cuts

While avoiding overall cutbacks, there were still clear winners and losers with some gaining at the expense of others

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Poetry Society
Part of the celebrations for the Poetry Day centenary in 2009. While the organisers of that event, the Poetry Society, will continue to receive Arts Council funding, other literary groups will miss out. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Literature has fared best in the new Arts Council England budget, with spending set to increase by nearly 10% while all other fields see cutbacks.

According to the Arts Council figures, spending on literature will rise 9.9% in real terms, from £5.9m in 2010-11 to £7.2m in 2014/15. This comes while music suffers an 11.4% loss in real terms over the three-year period, with theatre cut by 10.9%, dance by 7.7%, the visual arts 7.2% and multi-arts forms 2.6%.

But there are clear winners and losers, with the Arts Council looking to promote some literature organisations at the expense of others. Among the winners are the Ilkley Literature Festival, seeing a real terms rise of over 150%, and English PEN, up 190%, together with 11 organisations, including the Ministry of Stories and Comma Press, now funded for the first time.

On the losing side are the 16 organisations who have lost all funding, including publisher Ayebia and the Poetry Book Society.The total number of literature organisations receiving Arts Council funding has fallen from 59 to 53.

Rachel Feldberg, director of the Ilkley Literature Festival, said she felt acutely torn between delight at her own "hugely fortunate" result and despair for Yorkshire colleagues such as Wordquake, and publishers ARC and Primary Colours, from whom all Arts Council funding has been withdrawn. "It's exciting for us but for our colleagues the outlook may be bleak," she said. The increased funding will enable the festival to continue and expand projects including work with young people in Leeds and Bradford schools.

Eric Lane of Dedalus, which will see a 35.4% increase in its core funding, said fiction had been less badly affected than had been anticipated. "We had assessments in 2010 where Arts Council England said that in future maybe fiction wouldn't be funded at all," he said. "If you were a fiction publisher and you listened to the mood music, you were prepared for a very hard time."

But Lane warned that his funding increase should be considered in the context of individual translation grants being discontinued. "What you get in your core grant is now everything, so in one way our funding's gone down," he said.

At the Poetry Book Society (PBS), director Chris Holifield said the organisation was stunned by the decision to cut its funding. "We will try to find a way for the PBS to survive but its future must now be in doubt, and the poetry world and especially poetry readers will be the losers," she said, adding that it was ironic that an organisation set up by the Arts Council had its future undermined by the same organisation.

Arts Council spokesperson Louise Wylie said: "We're moving towards supporting new writers, and those at the beginning and middle of their career, and overall it's about a wider reach. All organisations [with regularly funded status] will be those who reach more people." Wylie said the Poetry Book Society's loss was unfortunate, but added: "We are supporting other organisations such as the Poetry Society and the Poetry School, who reach more people. The Poetry Book Society's membership is very static." She added: "We do want a conversation about how we can support the TS Eliot prize [awarded by the Poetry Book Society] going forward."

The Arts Council was criticised for the way it implemented the last round of funding cuts, but has had praise in some quarters for its handling of the process this time around. Feldberg said: "The process has been much more transparent and it felt as though we were all on one team." Lane said: "The Arts Council has learned from 2008 and for that they must receive some credit."

Winners and losers

Literature organisations entering the Arts Council portfolio:

The Ministry of Stories

The Children's Bookshow

Poet in the City

Forward Arts Foundation

Faber & Faber

Children's Discovery Centre, East London

Writing on the Wall

Comma Press

Cyprus Well

Writing West Midlands

The Writing Squad

... and those losing out

The Poetry Trust

Poetry Book Society

Independent Publishers Guild

Enitharmon Press

Children's Discovery Centre

Flambard Press

The Windows Project

Litfest

Circle of Literary Friends, Merseyside

Ayebia

Writers in Prison Network

Wordquake

Primary Colours

National Association of Writers in Education

National Association for Literature Development

Arc Publications

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