Bromley House Residency 2025

Two young writers in residence explore the Alan Sillitoe collection at Bromley House Library.

We are very excited to announce our first Young Writers in Residence took place. The opportunity was in partnership with Bromley House and involved a week-long residency between 17th and 21st February in their historical library. The competitive opportunity was made available to members of the Nottingham City of Literature Youth Board and the Speak Easy Collective.  

The focus of this residency was to explore the Alan Sillitoe collection and produce a creative written response. This was the first of its kind and we are extremely grateful for Bromley House for collaborating with us on an opportunity for our young writing community.

We hope to be able to offer this residency again as part of our commitment to creating opportunities for young creatives in Nottinghamshire. Follow our social media and subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates. 

Residency aims

This residency provided young writers with experiences and skills that will be useful for them in pursuing a professional writing career. 

  1. Experience of completing a writing residency application
  2. Gaining confidence in accessing a historical collection and working in an archival setting 
  3. Responding to a brief and producing an output 
  4. Receiving feedback on creative work from a peer and responding appropriately
  5. Describing their creative process and articulating their learning
  6. Performing in front of an audience

Meet the Writers 

Henry Lambert is a Notts-based writer of poetry and prose, who has been writing since he was 7, compelled by Mary Oliver poems, open mics and an eternal need to learn bigger and fancier words. He is a member of the Nottingham City Of Literature Youth Advisory Board and the Speak Easy collective and has worked with a Writing East Midlands writing group for an Arts Award in creative writing. He has also performed twice at the Unislam young writers showcase in Birmingham, having been one of the youngest poets to do so. On top of juggling A-levels and poetry, his literary focus is primarily given to writing a nautical dystopian novel that he intends to publish in the near future.

 

Flynn Ledger is a Mansfield-based poet and a recent Creative Writing graduate from Nottingham Trent University. He has performed at Nottingham Poetry Festival and was part of the NTU WRAP X Bad Betty Press showcase. He is a regular attendee of Speak Easy open-mics, and is currently working on his first poetry collection outside of his dissertation.

 

 

 

Creative Outputs

Read the wonderful outputs from Henry and Flynn below. 

Henry’s The Ghost Library and Flynn’s Shelf AS-D And Those Yet To Be Classified

Feedback from Bromley House project lead Heather Green:  

It was wonderful to welcome Henry and Flynn to Bromley House Library. Our Alan Sillitoe collection is one of our treasures; having belonged to one of Nottingham’s most well-known writers and whose work contains such a sense of place. Facilitating new young writers to connect with the collection was hugely rewarding and we were truly blown away by their responses. It was a real privilege to see Leanne at work in guiding and focussing initial ideas, and the response from the showcase was phenomenal.

 

Bromley House

Bromley House is a private membership lending library with a huge collection of books and artefacts. It has been in operation since 1816. 
The collection of over 50,000 books, manuscripts, maps and other materials is spread over three floors of our beautiful Grade II* listed building, right in the middle of Nottingham’s city centre. 

Writing Mentorship

The young writers mentor is Leanne Moden, who will help them to explore the collection, develop their creative writing and respond to the brief. 
Leanne Moden is a poet, theatre-maker, and freelance educator, based in Nottingham.

Leanne has performed poetry at events all across the UK and Europe, and her second collection was published in 2020. Leanne works as a writer in residence with First Story, supporting secondary school pupils to publish their creative writing. She also runs the Writing East Midlands young people’s writing workshops in Nottingham and Mansfield, and supports the Writing East Midlands Youth Board. Leanne is fuelled by fruit tea, Jaffa Cakes, and unrelenting whimsy. 
 
 
 

Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe was an author born and raised in Nottingham. His writing career spanned from the publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1958 until his death in 2010, after which his final novel was published posthumously. Alan Sillitoe was often referred to as one of the coined “Angry Young Men” of the British writing scene in the 1950s; writers whose protagonists’ were from middle- and working-class backgrounds and who predominantly presented dissatisfaction and disillusionment with society.

Even for those unfamiliar with Sillitoe’s work, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may well be recognisable. Key lines such as “whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” are frequently quoted, and inspired the album title for The Arctic Monkeys.

The Alan Sillitoe collection at Bromley House Library was donated by Sillitoe’s widow, Ruth Fainlight. The collection predominantly consists of the couple’s personal reading library, which was previously held at their holiday home in Derbyshire. It also contains the author’s OS maps (which were extremely important to him) as well as various inserts – letters, posters for book launches, postcards and marginalia. The collection gives a unique insight into Alan Sillitoe’s potential inspiration for his novels and is perhaps the largest collection relating to the author currently held in the country.

Take a deeper dive

We’re lucky enough to share further insights into the residency experience through two blogs, written by Flynn Ledger and Leanne Moden.