Whether you are an established novelist, write poems in your spare time or are only just beginning your creative journey, Europeana has put together a programme of autumn events to support your practice and inspire you. Explore what’s planned and register below!
Europeana Creative Climate Action Award
The first Europeana Creative Climate Action Award is now closed to submissions. We asked for up to 500 words of creative writing, fiction or poetry inspired by one or more of the images in our Europeana Creative Climate Action Award gallery, which has been curated by the Europeana Climate Action Community.
Look out for news of the winners and an exhibition on Europeana.eu later in the spring!
The Europeana Writers’ Room
On the first Wednesday of every month we run the Europeana Writers’ Room. In this hour, we use illustrations and imagery from the collections available on Europeana.eu to prompt reflection and writing on a different theme. Each session starts with gentle warm-up exercises and then longer prompts to help you to start your stories and ideas.
You can also access all the prompts and exercises, and share your writing on the Europeana Writers' Room section of the Europeana Academy (log-in required). So if you missed a workshop, want to look again, or work through the prompts at your own pace, then head to the Europeana Academy.
Structured training through Europeana Academy
Europeana Academy is our training programme for professionals working with, in and around cultural heritage. Through the Academy, we offer live, online training courses on digital storytelling and writing, alongside self-paced courses on our digital training platform.
The live training runs four times a year, with the next sessions coming up shortly! ‘Introduction to collections, audiences and stories on Europeana.eu‘, focuses on how you can use the collections on Europeana.eu to create stories, and next takes place on 9 December. Register now
‘How to tell great stories and write for Europeana.eu’ focuses on creating editorial for Europeana.eu and with cultural heritage collections and next takes place on 12 December. Register now
If you want to follow these courses at your own pace, you can sign up to take them on the Europeana Training Platform.
A quiet writing hour with art and culture
Complementing our active Writers' Room workshops, e****very other week on a Friday morning, we run ‘a quiet writing hour with art and culture’. This offers a silent, online and focused space to create and write in companionship with others doing the same. Art and cultural heritage items will be shared on the screen during the workshop, but there are no spoken prompts or interaction.
This event is organised as part of the Shut Up & Write! initiative, a global community that empowers writers to overcome procrastination, silence their inner critic and make consistent progress on their projects.
Meet our expert
All of these events are run by Europeana’s Editorial Advisor, Dr Beth Daley. Beth is a novelist, cultural and creative writer and works on engaging a broad range of audiences in Europeana’s work and content. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, runs a range of writing workshops and her first novel, ‘Blood and Water' is published by Hic Dragones in Manchester.
Beth says, ‘Writing is a really valuable skill that’s useful in all sorts of professional scenarios but it’s much more than that - I strongly believe it’s a brilliant tool we can all develop to explore our ideas and learn how to express ourselves, which benefits our wellbeing and our sense of who we are as individuals.‘
Get more support and inspiration
You can see an overview of all of these events (and more!) on our events page, or sign up to our events and training newsletter to get them straight to your inbox.
We also have resources to support writers using digital cultural heritage for their work, including our seven digital storytelling tips (available in 14 languages) and our story dice.
Finally, our Europeana Communicators Community runs activities around digital storytelling and is a community for Europe’s creatives and communications professionals. Sign up today!
Explore a summary of these activities through the flyer below.
