Poet fights sale of authors' archives

A campaign to prevent the private archives of Britain's finest living writers such as Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie being sold to wealthy American libraries is being launched by Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate.

Backed by officials in the Arts Council and British Library, Mr Motion is to urge ministers to help British universities and libraries to match the huge sums routinely offered by US collectors to modern novelists, poets and playwrights.

The Poet Laureate said ministers should introduce tax breaks, support new rules which would allow lottery money to be spent on modern writers or support a national endowment fund to buy archives.

"People go on about how great Britain's literary heritage is, but what are they doing about preserving it? Almost nothing, and that's shameful," Mr Motion said. "Ministers should make this a priority because the stream of work going overseas is a steady one, while every day we just twiddle our thumbs."

Mr Motion and other major literary figures such as the biographer Michael Holroyd have become increasingly alarmed by the growing number of British writers who have sold their papers to American universities.

Ted Hughes, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard and David Hare have sold their papers to wealthy institutions based at Yale University, the University of Texas and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The prices they received are generally kept secret but Hughes, then in poor health and in need of money for his family, is understood to have sold his archive for about £500,000 to Emory University in 1997. He died the following year. Stoppard's collection is rumoured to have attracted a seven-figure sum.

Backed by wealthy philanthropists, American buyers now have the collections of Britain's most significant modern writers in their sights, including the poet Seamus Heaney, and the novelists Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and William Golding.

Literary sources believe that Heaney, described by one American collector as the most significant Irish poet since Yeats, will command well over £1m for his private papers and manuscripts. Rushdie can expect similar offers.

Mr Motion's proposal will provoke fears that writers could use the scheme to inflate the price of their collections, playing British collections off against American buyers. However, his supporters argue that many British writers would, for patriotic reasons, accept a lower price from a British institution. The Poet Laureate himself sold his archives to the British Library in 1999 for just over £30,000 ­ less than a US library would have paid.

The most powerful and acquisitive American library is the Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center, which is based in rent-free premises at the University of Texas in Austin and spends about $3m (£2m) a year on its manuscript collections. Its collection specialises in British and Irish writers, and features significant archives from Stoppard, Evelyn Waugh, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, James Joyce and Edith Sitwell. Many major writers are attracted by the scale and prestige of this collection ­ and see having their work alongside these authors as a major accolade.

Dr Thomas Staley, director of the Ransom Center, said his British competitors should not underestimate the extra costs of buying archives, including specialist services such as copying, cataloguing and restoration. It also funded 35 bursaries for overseas researchers. "It doesn't necessarily solve the problem simply by amassing the funds for buying them ­ that's just the beginning," he said. "Writers are also concerned with what is going to happen with their archive."

British libraries are routinely hampered by a general lack of funds. Rules introduced under the Tories bar the Heritage Lottery Fund from buying works of art which are less than 20 years old, to stop money being misspent on "fashionable" work of little historical value.

The HLF receives about £300m a year in lottery grants, and has more than £900m in the Treasury which is earmarked for projects but has still to be spent. Although the fund gave the British Library £1.2m to buy Sir Laurence Olivier's archive, it refused to help the National Library of Scotland to buy Muriel Spark's collection or Nottingham City Library to buy Alan Sillitoe's papers. The Scottish library eventually raised money from other sources, but Sillitoe's archive went to the US.

The legislation that allows ministers to block temporarily the export of major works of art to allow British institutions time to raise the money to buy them back does not apply to living writers. Because of all these factors, major authors now assume that no British collection can afford to buy their papers.

"We would be glad if something could be done to reduce that perception," said Hugh Cobbe, head of manuscripts at the British Library. "The tax benefits for people who give things to national collections in this country aren't nearly as generous as they are in other countries."

Mr Motion approached Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and Dawn Primarolo, the Paymaster General, about two years ago to suggest tax breaks for writers who sold their papers to British collections. Ms Primarolo was sympathetic but rejected his appeal because it could create a precedent.

Mr Motion said that now the election was over, he would lobby the arts and education ministers in Tony Blair's new government. The poet, who chairs the Arts Council's literature committee, has also won the support of senior Arts Council officials. They plan to ask its ruling council to endorse the campaign.

The Treasury said it was unable to comment about Mr Motion's latest proposals until new ministers were appointed. A spokeswoman for the Heritage Lottery Fund, however, said it could relax its "20-year rule" next year, under a detailed review of its spending rules. Despite its current restrictions, it had "an open mind" about Mr Motion's initiative, she said.