Young people’s creativity celebrated in multilingual poetry competition Mother Tongue Other Tongue

Young people aged 8-18, who took part in this year’s Queen’s Anniversary Prize-winning multilingual poetry competition Mother Tongue Other Tongue were showcased at a day of celebration events. 

Mother Tongue Other Tongue (MTOT) is an annual, multilingual poetry competition that encourages young people to share poetry in their ‘mother tongue’ or to be creative in an ‘other tongue’ that they are learning.

Created by former Poet Laureate Professor Carol Ann Duffy as a Laureate Education project in 2012, this year, it is run by the Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University.

This year, more than 3500 young people from 37 schools took part in activities resulting in poems being submitted in 47 different languages. Entries were mainly from the North of England but included others from as far afield as Milan and Oman.

More than 90 young people had their poems published in the 2023 Mother Tongue Other Tongue anthology and many of these attended, along with fellow pupils, teachers and their parents, to celebrate at Manchester Poetry Library and receive copies of their published work.

In the afternoon, pupils from 20 schools participated in poet-led creative writing workshops, before taking part in a celebratory presentation event where award-winning poet Malika Booker presented prize-winners with copies of the anthology.

Many more returned with parents and teachers for an evening celebration in Manchester Poetry Library, where they met project founder, Carol Ann Duffy and took to the stage to share their language stories and their poetry with Malika Booker. 

Manchester Met was awarded with the highly prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education and Further Education in 2019 for MTOT, in recognition of the project helping to foster pride for community languages and cultures.

It has previously won endorsements from education activist Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner, and award-winning poet Imtiaz Dharker.

Kaye Tew, Education Manager at Manchester Met said: “After weeks of reading, judging and editing the work that was sent in for the competition, it is wonderful to actually hear these articulate and passionate young people talk about their experiences and to see their pleasure at seeing their writing in print.”

The 2024 Mother Tongue Other Tongue competition will be announced in the autumn, and officially launched in February 2024.

To find out more and to view the anthology featuring the winning poems please visit the Mother Tongue Other Tongue website.