Emma Boniwell

In a career lasting over 20 years, Emma has worked on many projects.

Creative Europe
Most recently, she has been involved in a large Creative Europe project, READ On, which encouraged young people to engage with reading and writing. This large project, with 7 partners from Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Norway, worked in a multi-disciplinary way, using a wide range of methods designed to meet the young people where their interests lay.

Spark Young Writers
Emma also runs the Spark Young Writers project for Writing West Midlands, which includes more than 170 creative writing workshops for 8-18 year olds across the West Midlands region, two online magazines and one printed anthology per year. She also delivers a careers conference for young people interested in becoming writers, or working in associated industries.

Birmingham 2022 – a Creative City
Emma successfully bid for funding, and delivered a project for the Birmingham 2022 Festival as part of the Commonwealth Games to produce short poetry films written and filmed by young people where they share their perception of what it is to be a young person in Birmingham today, and their thoughts about the Commonwealth. These films can be seen here.

IT Projects
With her work at the Society of Authors as Membership Manager (2002-2011), Emma led on the migration and implementation of two new databases to manage the 9000+ members and their subscriptions. Subsequently, Emma is still searching for the perfect database to run the Spark Young Writers groups. Emma has some old-school knowledge of Access databases and html website coding which is frequently very helpful when troubleshooting and surprising to web developers!