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A Plymouth arts collective is to continue publishing literary magazines and is working on creating a major literature festival for the city after receiving further support from Arts Council England.

Wonderzoo has been a leading name in the Ocean City’s cultural sphere since 2015, running successful literary and visual arts events, involving hundreds of writers and artists.

It moved onto a more business footing in 2020 after being granted £13,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), the public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Now has received further backing with a £15,000 ACE grant for 2021 and £5,000 from Pop Plus (Plymouth Octopus Project) to develop research into staging a festival based around words.

Wonderzoo is working with on this with partners Imperfect Cinema and Soapbox Culture and has employed Plymouth poet and artist Caitlin Brawn as a researcher for the project.

The idea has been to follow the success of the prominent Port Eliot Festival, in St Germans, near Plymouth. That festival attracted famous novelists, musicians, fashion designers, chefs, artists and other creatives since 2003, but decided not to carry on after 2019 because it was no longer financially viable.

Meanwhile, Wonderzoo will continue to publish arts and literary magazines in 2021 after . These digital publications featured work from dozens of artists and writers from Plymouth and beyond.

Wonderzoo is also continuing with live events, now streamed, a Radical Reading Group, exploring “dystopian” literature and film, and story-telling workshops.