Sarah Salway's laureateship was launched at the fifth Canterbury Festival Poetry Competition and the post will centre on an intergenerational creative writing project entitled Wise Words, to be delivered by Sarah Salway and Canterbury Festival.

For the project, Canterbury Festival is looking for existing community groups of people aged under 18 and over 60 who would be interested in taking part in a series of creative writing workshops designed to encourage correspondence between the groups. Whether you're a youth group, a silver choir or short mat bowls club, your linguistic talents are not important because you will be equipped with the skills and inspiration to tell your stories and share your own wise words which will be published in an anthology for generations to come!

This is a fantastic opportunity to be part of a project with Sarah Salway, who has taught at the University of Kent and is currently the Royal Literary Fellow at the London School of Economics.  As well as her award-winning collection of short stories Leading the Dance (2006), Sarah has also written three highly acclaimed novels, Something Beginning With (2004), Tell Me Everything (2006) and Getting the Picture (2010), her latest novel about love and rivalry in a care home.

Her poetry has been published in the Financial Times, Virago Book of Shopping and Poetry London magazine to name just a few and her latest poetry collection entitled You Do Not need Another Self Help Book, will be published by Pindrop Press in April next year, by which time she will have taken the Chair of the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society.

Sarah says "I'm really excited about my new role, particularly as Canterbury, and indeed the whole of Kent, has such a rich and inspiring heritage for all writers. I'm looking forward to working with both established groups, and some more unusual ones, to write exciting new stories based on the idea of Wise Words. In my own creative work, I will be exploring the power of telling stories, using characters at different periods of Kent's history."

The Wise Words project is set to launch in January and its evolution will be documented online at www.sarahsalway.net.

The Canterbury Laureate scheme is a partnership project between Canterbury City Council and Canterbury Festival.  For further information or if your community groups would like to take part, contact Alison Chambers on alison@canterburyfestival.co.uk / 01227 452853.