‘English: Shared Futures’, the event after which this volume is named, was a huge celebration of the intellectual strength, diversity and dynamism of the English Language, Literature and Creative Writing community, held in Newcastle in the summer of 2017. Part-conference, part-festival, partprofessional meeting, it brought together 600 academics, writers, publishers, teachers and students.

Like a more traditional conference, it had around 150 panels on a range of intellectual matters from Old English to contemporary literature and theory to creative writing; plenary lectures from Deborah Cameron (English Language), Bernardine Evaristo (Creative Writing) and Brian Ward (on Martin Luther King's honorary degree from Newcastle University, to celebrate our local connections) and a plenary panel on literary biography from Martin Stannard, Kathryn Hughes and Andrew Hadfield. Sixteen of our learned societies ran sessions. And all the major UK academic publishers attended, as did many of the smaller local publishers in this vibrant and creative part of the country.

Like a professional meeting, there were sessions on advocacy, collegiality, diversity, management, broadcast media, harassment, employability, TEF, mentoring and calibration. Well aware of the consequences of precarity in the profession, there were sessions organised by and for early career academics and PhD students, and the English Association used the conference to pilot a large, site-specific mentoring scheme, putting junior and senior academics in touch. There was a special interest too in pedagogy across the discipline, focusing on the curriculum, creativity, new approaches and on crossing the HE/Secondary school divide. Specially sponsored by University English, there was an international panel on ‘The Discipline of English and the Work of the Humanities’ with Stefan Collini, Helen Small, Amanda Anderson and Chris Newfield.

And like a literary festival, we had a feast of readings, talks and exhibitions. For many, the highlight was the ‘Night of Three Laureates’ with readings from Carol Ann Duffy and Lorna Goodison, respectively Britain's and Jamaica's Poets Laureate, and Jackie Kay, the Scottish Makar, and there were readings from ‘The Cold Boat’ project and other local poets.