Mandy Coe

Mandy Coe’s 2010 collection If You Could See Laughter was short-listed for a Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) Children’s Poetry Award. Author of five poetry collections, she won the Ilkley Festival Poetry Prize in 2006, Liverpool’s Ted Walters Memorial Prize in 2008 and was joint winner of the first ever Manchester Poetry Prize. She coordinated “Survive and Subvert”, a highly-acclaimed conference for teachers on maintaining passionate creativity in the classroom in the face of arts funding cuts, at the 2012 Manchester Children’s Book Festival. Mandy was Chair of Judges for the 2014 Manchester Writing for Children Prize, an MMU project that aimed to seek out the best new poetry for children from around the world and resulted in an illustrated anthology, Let in the Stars, which featured the work of 30 poets – based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Uganda, and the USA. The project led to a national campaign to revitalize the publication and provision of new poetry for children, led by Mandy and Manchester Met and with support for Arts Council England. Mandy has been commissioned by Manchester Poetry Library to co-curate the children’s poetry collection. Belonging Street, a new collection of poetry for children by Mandy, was published in 2020.