Scottish writers
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A busy but doubtless exhilarating day awaits me tomorrow at Linlithgow Book Festival 2013. In the morning, I’m running a poetry workshop as I have done for the part several years. It’s at the Mel Gray centre at the canal basin from 10.30 to 12.30 and there are still some tickets available. In the afternoon,
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I was shocked and saddened, like the Scottish literary world in general, to learn back in February that Gavin Wallace, the head of literature at Creative Scotland, had died. I didn’t know Gavin well, but I can say with certainty that The North End of the Possible would not be the book it is without the
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Some cracking news: AB Jackson’s Donut pamphlet Apocrypha is the next PBS pamphlet choice. Well done, ABJ and Donut! It’s an excellent publication — tremendous poetry, beautifully designed — and a well-deserved accolade. If you don’t already have it, snap it up: it’s a limited edition of 250 copies. While you’re at it, you might
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The shortlist for this year’s Crashaw prize was announced this week, and I was delighted to see that my friend Stephen Nelson is among their number. I was almost equally pleased to see that he’s the first of the shortlisted authors to be profiled on the Salt blog. All digits are disecting for him. Stephen
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“Good art stops being art — it becomes a way of being happy, of receiving something beautiful and human from stranger, of confirming one’s identity, of being not alone.” AL Kennedy in The Guardian books blog today arguing with typical intelligence, wit and accessiblity that it’s not unreasonable to defend arts funding when all the
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Today is the centenary of Norman MacCaig‘s birth and, later today, I’ll be reading a new poem partly inspired by MacCaig’s “New Maps and Old” at the Poetry at the GVR MacCaig 100 celebration. MacCaig is an important figure for me. I credit having read him for Higher English with nudging me into writing poetry
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The category winners for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust book awards have been announced. The first book prize went to Sarah Gabriel’s Eating Pomegranates. Congratulations to her and commiserations to my fellow nominees JO Morgan and Momus. I confess I haven’t read her book yet, but I certainly will. It sounds like a powerful volume.
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Congratulations to Robert Crawford on winning the Saltire Society’s book of the year award and commiserations to my friend Alison Lang on not winning the first book award. News of the results is surprisingly hard to come by, with rather scant information in the BBC online report and naething ava on the Saltire Society’s own
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Big congratulations to my friend and erstwhile colleague Alison Lang, whose short-story collection Caint na Caileige Caillte has been shortlisted for the first book award in the Saltire Society Literary Awards this year! Readers furth of Scotland may not be familiar with this prize, but it’s a significant achievement in Scottish terms. Fingers crossed for
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Yesterday, the winner of the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize was announced as JO Morgan for Natural Mechanical. It’s a fine book and a deserving winner. A book-length narrative poem that so deftly handles shifts in time, perspective and voice would be an impressive achievement at any point in a poet’s writing life, but to produce
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Yes, it was a busy weekend. After the Golden Hour kneesings-up, it was off to Glasgow on Saturday for the Merchant City Festival writing conference. I wasn’t able to catch much of the event outside of my workshop and reading, but I did hear some of the panel discussion and contribute to the ensuing lively
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It was a week for anthologies last week, what with the Forward book arriving in the post and the launch of The Golden Hour Book Vol ii at Blackwell’s on South Bridge (the old James Thin shop, for those who remember that much-lamented Edinburgh institution of yore). The GH book is a triumph, I have to
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Just received my contributor’s copies of Poetry Scotland issue 62. “All New Scottish” consists entirely of work by writers from Scotland who haven’t featured in the magazine before. I have two poems in there: “MacAdam’s Lament for Island Life” and “Onding”. Hard to believe, perhaps, that I’ve never been in PS, but I’d just never
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Despite holidaying in Eyemouth, on Thursday last week, I joined most of the other contributors* (inlcuding one of the translators) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to launch 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. The evening was slightly chaotic but enormous fun. A good-sized audience, too, for a Thursday in holiday time
Amy Jo Philip 