I’m a 26-year-old Yorkshire émigré living in Manchester, having exchanged the pastoral environs of my home town in North Yorkshire for the Cottonopolis. I work as a freelance copywriter and editor, in addition to working in a marketing and PR role for Asymptote – a world literature and literary translation journal that has recently been invited to join the Guardian Book Network. Like a great many other literature graduates, I struggled to find a job that was relevant to my degree and interests, so I was fortunate to stumble across the vacancy at Asymptote when I did.
I began reading the Guardian around the time I started university. The papers in our house were always local, either the Northern Echo, Yorkshire Post or the Darlington & Stockton Times, so I’m fairly certain that I’m the only member of my immediate family who reads the paper. I think there’s a lingering antipathy towards the main publications in that they don’t always offer accurate pictures of the north or care about local issues. Obviously Helen Pidd, the Guardian’s northern editor, offers a strong counter-argument to this view.
I gravitate towards the books and culture sections, and the paper has a great record in supporting marginalised voices within world literature and securing some fantastic exclusives (I loved the recent conversation between Marlon James and Jeanette Winterson for instance). I love that there is a genuine passion for and commitment to supporting independent publications, which are doing the real work of championing new authors on shoestring budgets and are reliant on donations and public awareness to keep themselves afloat. In this regard, I think that Marta Bausells and the team do an excellent job of highlighting hidden literary treasures and the indie outlets working to bring those voices to readers.
I do see talk online about the uncertainty of the Guardian’s future, but it does seem like the one outlet that is most attuned to the changing landscape of readers and hasn’t to my mind ever compromised its journalistic integrity during its transition to a web-centric approach. And you can’t say that of other newspapers.
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