ULVERSTON'S literary festival is set to get even bigger in the next few years as organisers pitch for extra cash.

Following Arts Council encouragement, the Word Market committee has a consultant on board - paid for by Arts Council North West - to put together a three-year funding bid for its board.

Word Market committee member and Ulverston writer Zosia Wand initiated and crafted the original National Lottery bid with South Cumbria Playwrights (SCP) that started the literature festival rolling two years ago. She explained that the plan was to turn Word Market into a permanent festival with a year-round programme of events and a celebratory week in February.

Fuller details will be thrashed out before the bid is submitted in April. Meanwhile, Word Market itself will become a limited company.

With the Arts Council's support,Word Market should be able to build on the progress it has already made. Its 2003 programme has been expanded to create this year's spectacular crowd-pulling event, which came to a close on February 14. Highlights included a Poem and a Pint night with leading UK poet Simon Armitage, five-minute scripts written by local writers and performed in pubs around Ulverston, Dalton and Barrow and a Readers Conference with such literary luminaries as Anne Caldwell and author Sarah Harrison.

In a nation where literary festivals are popping-up all over the place, Zosia believes Ulverston's event - which has emerged from an already very active collection of local writing, reading and drama groups - has a formula that ensures it won't be a flash-in-the-pan.

"It's very different from other festivals because it's not just based around big names and bums on seats. It's based around local groups devising events that they want to see happen so that the audience creates its own events with the help of professionals."

Crucially, Word Market has also succeeded in its goal of giving a leg-up to local writers by providing both writing opportunities and confidence-boosting performance and organisational experience. Barrow-based poet Ann Wilson, who was MC at Word Market's song writing event, has been hired for more of the same, while SCP member Robin Battersby has landed a job as an arts development officer and Zosia has worked on the national literature project The Big Read, all as a result of their Word Market work.

"This festival has been fantastic, I'm just blown away," said Zosia. "With the Poem and a Pint evening we have gone from an audience of 30 when it started in 1999, which is still a good audience for a poetry evening, to more than 200. That just shows Word Market is developing audiences, it is doing what it set out to do."