This article considers questions surrounding the teaching of writing "from different cultures and traditions", in the context of debates over multiculturalism in Britain today, and contends that English teachers have a vital role to play in the survival and flourishing of multicultural British society. In view of the self-consciously multicultural character of so much contemporary British writing, it is argued here that approaches to the teaching of texts from "different" cultures should be radically revised. For rather than being indices of "difference", such texts frequently turn out to be both revealing of our own culture, and fundamentally concerned with the lived experience of multicultural societies and identities.