If you visit the Get Involved section of our website, you find out that Barnsley Young Writers is the key local resource for young people passionate about creative writing. You’ll also find out that they meet every two weeks, and that the group offers workshops for 14- to 19-year-olds; providing a safe and supportive environment for neurodivergent young people and those identifying as LGBTQIA+. And that participants explore poetry, short stories and playwriting, with the opportunity to be published, perform, enter national competitions, and receive one-to-one mentoring.
Sounds good right? Sounds like the kind of thing you wish you’d have available when you were young? Yes, we agree. Which is why it is a cornerstone of our community engagement programme and why we wanted to use this month’s In Focus to shine a light on all things Barnsley Young Writers.
My name is Jason and I’m the Community Engagement Manager at Barnsley Civic. Barnsley Young Writers has been part of Barnsley Civic’s community engagement programme since 2019, and a permanent part of our core programming since 2022.
In 2019, Vicky Morris, the writer and founder of the Hive Young Writers network contacted me to find out if the Civic was interested in collaborating. At that point, I had been aware of Hive’s work in Barnsley, having seen some of their workshops with Horizon Community College and young person’s organisation Chilypep. Hive had also been doing sporadic project based work in Barnsley for a couple of years; the most prominent of which was for Barnsley Museums’ Hear My Voice project. Vicky had seen potential in one of our exhibitions (the photography exhibition Visible Girls by Anita Corbin), as a tool for inspiration and wanted to organise a visit to our gallery for what was their current cohort of young writers. Having once upon a time been a teenager who loved to read and write poetry, I was excited by this prospect. I’d only recently started by role at the Civic’s then Community Engagement Officer.
The Visible Girls collab was an instant success and once Vicky has embedded herself in the Civic for a few weeks and we’d had the chance to really chat, we instantly saw the potential in regular Barnsley Young Writers group, based at the Civic. Hive already had Sheffield Young Writers and Rotherham Young Writers groups, as well as a then new spin-off set up by Hive alumnus poet Warda Yassin, for young women writers of colour called Mixing Roots, and we were now going to add another group to Hive’s oeuvre.
As we moved into 2020, we ran a Barnsley Young Writers group in response to exhibitions by Barnsley artist Mark Evans and Leeds artist Paula Chambers, in which young people had a creative writing workshop with Vicky. They were a hit, but before you knew it, Covid landed and scuppered our plans!
We relaunched Barnsley Young Writers in February 2022, after plenty of planning and securing enough budget to run a twice monthly group for an initial six months. Our aim this time was to be a regular group that would focus on creative writing skills, which would often take inspiration from the Civic’s exhibition programme and other projects that might come out way. After promoting the sessions on social media and with local secondary schools and college, our first session had a healthy group of 12 young people attend; the majority of which were from schools all over Barnsley. Following 18 months of lockdown, we’d found ourselves with young people that had been massively impacted by the pandemic; some had never been on a bus or train alone, or been outside of Barnsley as a teenager. And all extremely talented. Barnsley Civic and indeed Barnsley Young Writers was not just a place for creativity, but also a place for nurturing healthy minds.
The majority of Barnsley Young Writers sessions from this point on, were and still are, facilitated by Nik Perring (he’s the professional writer) and me (I brings the snacks and also join in with writing activities), and occasionally Vicky. After a full five months of sessions, we were fortunately able to take our young writers on the train to Sheffield’s Leadmill for their first taste of spoken word, at a launch event for one of Hive regular Young Writers anthologies (which you can read about here). Many of them became confident enough to read their writing in front of an audience of around a hundred and fifty, which included 60 other young performers. We were incredibly proud of them.
Since the summer of 2022, Barnsley Young Writers have seen members come and go, with many of that original cohort still attending when they can, when they’re on breaks from uni. And of course we have had many new members join us along the way.
The group have taken part in many projects. In 2023, Barnsley Civic ran an 18 month long Historic England funded project called Teenage Wildlife, which explored 70 years of youth culture on Eldon Street (the Civic’s home). As part of this, the group produced new writing inspired by their own teenage experiences and about the history of the buildings on Eldon Street. That writing appeared in the group’s first publication, which they launched with their own open mic event in the Civic’s theatre, in the summer of 2023.
Also in 2023, some of the group took part in Ear to the Streets: 24hrs in the life of South Yorkshire, an audio-visual love letter to the urban and rural life of South Yorkshire, featuring the words and voices of over 40 young writers from across the region’s cities, towns and villages, which was exhibited in Millennium Gallery Sheffield, as part of Off The Shelf Festival of Words.
The group have also been mentored by Vicky and Nik to enter writing into Hive’s annual young writers competition, aimed at writers aged 14 to 30, living, from, based or with a home address in the north/midlands; many of whom have gone of to be published in Hive’s young writers anthologies After Hours (2024) and most recently The Rising Line (2026).
The groups work have appeared in exhibitions, other publications in print and online, and in recent years, we have also taken Barnsley Young Writers workshops into local schools; Netherwood Academy in 2024 and Barnsley Academy in 2025. Each project resulted in a small publication for the students to keep.
In February this year, we ran a competition and event called The Teens Speech Award, which saw us rung workshops on speech writing and invited young people to submit their speeches into a competition. Fourty of those young people came to Barnsley Town Hall to read their speeches in the council chamber.
Since 2022, Barnsley Young Writers has been supported as part of Barnsley Civic’s Arts Council England NPO funding, grants from Creative Minds and Better Barnsley Bond, and most recently, as part of The Great Childhoods Ambition fund. We aim to keep Barnsley Young Writers part of our core programming for as long as we can, as we know how important free opportunities like these are in Barnsley.
I and the Civic take a great deal of pride in Barnsley Young Writers and the many young people that have attended. We also greatly value our relationship with Hive Young Writers Network, Vicky and Nik. I cannot understate the care that goes into developing Barnsley Young Writers and the quality of the opportunities that Vicky and Hive bring to the group.
Members of Hive have been published widely and won poetry slams and many writing competitions and awards such as the BBC Young Writers’ Award, the Orwell Youth Prize, Foyle Young Poet of the Year, New Poets Prize, Ledbury Poetry competition, Wales Young Poet Award and the Young Northern Writers Award. They’ve performed with top poets including Benjamin Zephaniah, Buddy Wakefield, and Hollie McNish, and interviewed favourite authors such as Malorie Blackman. Many have gone on to study writing at university or taken their writing further with a whole range of exciting opportunities.
Alumni includes Joe O’Brien (lead guitarist and songwriter in The Reytons), Sile Sibanda (BBC Radio Sheffield presenter), Sheffield Poet Laureates Warda Yassin, Danaé Wellington and Beth Davies and Barnsley Poet Laureate Eloise Unerman.
And with that, we ask, if you or someone you know is in Barnsley, is aged 14 – 19 and has a passion for creative writing, then see if they are interested in coming to Barnsley Young Writers. Just send an email to jasonwhite@barnsleycivic.co.uk to get started. It’s the perfect stepping-stone for anyone wanting to learn and reach their creative writing potential.
