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ILS offers £7,500 of new commissions

The International Literature Showcase (ILS) has issued an open call for three creative commissions each worth £2,500 to explore how literature is written, translated, presented, mediated or expanded online. This is the second of two calls for work that will form the ILS Collection, a series of work examining how global technology has impacted the written word.

The announcement comes as the ILS reveals the names of the first two artists who were commissioned for the project in November, and whose work will soon be showcased on the ILS website.

Hazel Grian, a performer, writer and director, with extensive experience devising interactive narratives, will unveil her project, A Tendency To Spill, in March, launching a chatbot that will help create short stories.

Berlin-based fiction and poetry writer, Martin Jackson will introduce his collaborative project, tutorials, in February, a poetry collection shared online via Google Docs that any visitor to the site can read, comment, or suggest edits to during its creation. This will run until June 2017, inverting the usual private experience of writing and providing a unique opportunity to test the limits of collaboration.

Run by Writers’ Centre Norwich, the British Council and Arts Council England, the ILS is a ten-month programme offered to selected UK writers and literature organisations to help promote and export their work across the world, through events, special commissions and an online platform. Free to access, this online space also helps bring together the wider professional global community to share expertise and build collaborations.

Chris Gribble, Chief Executive of Writers’ Centre Norwich, said, With new technologies continuing to open up new possibilities for the creation and distribution of creative work, we are delighted to be able to support artists and writers to develop new projects that explore the full potential digital innovation has to offer, that might otherwise not have been possible.”

Proposals for this second round of commissions should be submitted by 8 March 2017 and are open to artists from anywhere in the world. Full guidelines can be found on the ILS website.

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