Behind the downbeat headlines about community tension and Islamist unrest, the north of England's Asian community is nurturing something quite different: a new generation of poets schooled in the ancient traditions of Omar Khayyam.
The quiet growth of highly skilled composition, adapting Arabic and Persian styles to subjects such as central Bradford and the Sheffield canal, will be revealed to a wider audience in the Yorkshire Dales town of Ilkley this weekend.
For the first time in a 29-year history which began with WH Auden drunk in a cupboard - the festival is holding a mushaira, a "gathering of poets", in Urdu, Bengali and Hindi who use delicate quatrain and couplet styles dating back more than 1,000 years.
The recital by 12 leading exponents from Manchester, Oldham, Rotherham, Leeds and elsewhere is the biggest venture yet by a movement still on the fringes of mainstream publishing and national acclaim.
The festival director, Rachael Feldberg, calls it one of the most exciting events in a programme which also includes more conventional literary attractions, ranging from Alan Bennett to Ian Rankin.
"It's also drawing us in Ilkley closer to the centre of life in Bradford, our parent authority, and the Asian community there."
The poets include a quartet from Bradford, where the city's Asian literature development officer Hafeez Johar has held smaller mushairas in between composing his own verse.
He says: "There is quite a gathering of talent in the north, mostly people who were poets already when they came to Britain but others, younger ones, who have developed an interest here.
"Mushairas have taken place in people's houses to begin with, but now we have them in Bradford library.
"There's one in Oldham shortly and another in Manchester, but it's particularly good to be going to the Ilkley festival."
The event at the town's Playhouse answers a long-standing criticism of Ilkley culture as typical of a wealthy enclave which turns its back on nearby Bradford.
The novelist Angela Carter, a festival fan and regular guest, contrasted the "small, neat, clean town" with "darkly handsome, polyglot, multi-racial" Leeds and Bradford, which she found much more interesting.
The mushaira puts Ilkley's big ethnically-mixed neighbours centre-stage at last, with poems which include odes to Stockton-on-Tees and Doncaster.
Almost half the performers are women, who play as important a role in the movement as men, and have led the way in developing a British twist to the traditional, Eastern images of ghazal , the most popular Urdu form of verse.
"I went on a boat trip on the Don in Sheffield with a group of Bengali women to compose poems about rivers," says Debjani Chatterjee. She is the author of 32 books, mostly published by small poetry imprints, who is on the Playhouse reading list.
"One of the women, from Doncaster, combined the Don and the Ganges in her verse."
Ms Chatterjee's account of the day describes central Sheffield, where "the dragonfly flits in the Yorkshire afternoon".
Writers will also touch on British Asians' experience of displacement and settling in a new country, among them Basir Sultan Kazmi from Manchester, whose father Nasir Kazmi was a well known Pakistani ghazal poet.
"Nasir was displaced himself, from India after partition," says Mrs Chatterjee.
The event will also celebrate British literary links with south Asian verse, including the adoption of the nickname Saki - Farsi for a wine-pourer and a repeated image in ghazal poems - by the short-story master HH Munro.
Enthusiasts will also be reminded of Aziz in EM Forster's A Passage to India, who writes poems for a friend and has trouble meeting their insistence on "not too much about the bulbul", the Indian nightingale which has an almost compulsory place in a ghazal, even if it is about Batley.
The cultural exchanges extend to five primary schools taking courses with John Siddique, poet-in-residence at Ilkley this year, who encourages nine-year-olds from different backgrounds to jump language barriers.
For the first time, thanks to contacts Rachael Feldberg has made through British Asian taxi drivers in Ilkley, schools from Keighley with large ethnic minority catchments have been brought in.
Pausing in a session at the Manor House Museum with Ben Rhydding primary, Mr Siddique says: "I've just been with a school from Leeds where there were children writing in Farsi, Japanese, Malay, English and German.
"Five different languages and they wrote and recited poems in all of them, with translations, although often the sound of the verse was almost as important as the meaning."
"It's great," says 10-year-old Elise, who writes poems when she is upset or feels lonely. "You can make things up. A whole world of your own. Then you feel happy again."
· The mushaira is 1.30-3.30pm at Ilkley Playhouse on Sunday www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk
Reaching from there to here
Cultural currents - new cultural arrivals in the north of England:
· South Asian dance and music has one of its strongest national bases in Bradford, where the Kala Sangam company is rooted in Manningham. Two years ago the 98-year-old Wharfedale music festival became the first in the north to include competitive classes for the south Asian dance forms of Bhartanatyam, Kathak and Orrissi, and the playing of the sitar, tabla and moorsingh
· Britain's only Chinese arts centre opened in Manchester in 1986 and moved into a purpose-built £2.2m building a year ago. Masters of traditional calligraphy from across the world are given exhibition space, alongside classes in origami, Chinese music, tai chi, paper cutting and lion dancing
· Sheffield's Somali community has played a leading role in getting a traditionally oral storytelling culture into print for the first time, through local collections of verse and prose such as Pearls on a Broken String. Sheffield University has encouraged the project and interest in wider east African writing, including the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah, an immigrant from Zanzibar to Britain, who was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994
· Leeds houses the country's biggest Mongolian cultural collection and student community, whose graduates are helping translate the bible into Mongolian for the first time. Alumni also include Mongolia's prime minister, Nambar Enkhbayar, who read English in Leeds in 1986 and started a lifelong enjoyment of Marmite there
