Dublin is named a UNESCO City of Literature

[JBI]

Iowa City seems to count any writer who spent more than a week there as being from the city.

It's just obsessed with itself - Montreal for instance seems a much stronger literary centre. Just think of all the major Canadian modernists who began there.

[Niamh]

Look at the other cities though - you would think Paris, London, Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, New York, Beijing, Berlin, LA, etc., but Iowa, Edinburgh, and even Melbourne is a hesitant pick - it seems insulting to Dublin to be honest.

I can quite easily understand why Edinburgh is on the list. Its a hub for the Arts. Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe are two of the most popular in Europe.
Melbourne has a big literary festival and is big on promoting Sci Fi and Fantasy writing and writers.

[WICKES]

Margery Allingham
Eric Ambler
Kingsley Amis
Daisy Ashford
Geoffery Chaucer
Daniel Defoe
Daphne du Maurier
E.M. Forster
Stella Gibbons
Pamela Johnson
Alan Alexander Milne
John Milton
Edith Nesbit
Beatrix Potter
Emma Tenant
Evelyn Waugh
Anthony Trollope
Wilkie Collins
Christina Rossetti
William Makepeace Thackeray
Virginia Woolf
Robert Graves
Edmund Blunden
John Donne
Samuel Pepys
Colley Cibber
Alexander Pope
Henry James Pyre
William Blake
Lord Byron
John Keats
Mary Shelly
Stephen Spender
Andrew Motion


London is just some insignificant city that's only produced a few blokes like Chaucer and Milton, really not that important.


To be fair, a city has to have more qualifications than being the epicenters or great writers, that is, how they're promoting literary merit today. Here are the qualifications considered when choosing a city (from Wikipedia):

Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing in the city

Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature at primary, secondary and tertiary levels

Literature, drama and/or poetry playing an important role in the city

Hosting literary events and festivals which promote domestic and foreign literature;

Existence of libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres which preserve, promote and disseminate domestic and foreign literature

Involvement by the publishing sector in translating literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature

Active involvement of traditional and new media in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products.

You left Dickens (of all people!) off the list.

It's not only a matter of whether the writer was born there. Shakespeare wasn't born in London, but he spent all of his writing years there. Oscar Wilde spent his whole writing life in London as well and set most of his great works among the London upper classes. Several key works by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are also set in London. Or think of Dr Johnson, Hazlitt etc. You can't remove Boswell and Johnson from London- it is a part of them. Just as it is a part of Pepys. In fact I should think pretty much every great writer and thinker from the British Isles has lived in and worked in and been influenced by London at some point.

If you judge it by cultural history, the only rivals to London are Paris and, maybe, New York, Florence (400 years ago), Rome and Athens (2500 years ago). Like New York and Paris, London is one of those places that draws in artists, writers and intellectuals from around the world-especially from the English speaking world. Think of the American writer T.S Eliot. His Waste Land is a London poem, full of references to places in London. Just as the English Auden sets one of his great poems in New York.

Paris, New York, London- those are the three great cities for me. So far as culture goes you'd have to put London and Paris ahead of New York simply for the cultural resonance that comes with 800 years of drawing in the best minds- of having works set in them and written in them.

[OrphanPip]

It's just obsessed with itself - Montreal for instance seems a much stronger literary centre. Just think of all the major Canadian modernists who began there.

My post was more just on the counting of authors like Williams. From all I can gather the only time he spent in Iowa was doing his undergraduate degree, or Cunningham who did his Master's there. That doesn't really make them writers people would associate significantly with Iowa City.

Seriously, 70,000 people live in Iowa city, it's the fifth largest city in the state.