History

After several of his poems were published in Mercy Magazine, Nathan Jones hooked up with Ross Sutherland for the now legendary Fiction @ FACT ‘brand new quality poetics’ nights in Liverpool. These quickly become one of the best attended monthly poetry meetings in the country, with attendance figures regularly topping 150, at a time when this figure was unheard of outside London.  Fiction lasted just over two years, during which time we hosted Simon Armitage, Roddy Lumsden, Buddy Wakefield and Aisle 16 amongst significant others, as well as introducing a range of new-media collaborative presentations. During this time, Mercy became the umbrella organisation responsible for Fiction, and Nathan became its Project Manager.

It was also in this year that Liverpool vied for the Capital of Culture prize, and Mercy responded to the council’s heavy handed blanket street clean-ups with the THIS IS CULTURE guerilla campaign –  a series of huge blank fly posters bearing the message in five different languages ,which were posted up on the day the judges arrived in town. THIS IS CULTURE, and the later I AM CULTURE badge run, won the Dazed Re:Creation Award in 2004.

Our stance on the culture issue gained further national recognition when The Guardian called us up for our take on it.