Transatlantic Poetry Series - Niall Campbell
6 May, free online
Niall Campbell’s first collection, Moontide, appeared in 2014 & won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. His second collection, Noctuary, appeared in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His third collection, The Island in the Sound, was published in September 2024
Scottish and Irish Gothic
11 April, University of Edinburgh – free
Christina Morin: ‘“This execrable place”: Irish Gothic and the American Republic’
Dale Townshend: ‘Matthew Gregory Lewis in Scotland'
Matthew Sangster: ‘The Scottish Roots of Theorising the Fantastic’
Maddy Potter: ‘“'I shuddered at my own image”: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and the Demonic in Scottish Gothic
Claire Connolly: ‘Wet Gothic in Melmoth the Wanderer’
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/swinc-scottish-and-irish-gothic-tickets-1216652042009
Ayont the linn; ayont the linn,
Whaur gowdan wags the gorse,
A gowk gaed cryin’: “Come ye in:
I’ve fairins in my purse…”
—William Soutar, “The Gowk”
in Collected Published Poetry, @tippermuirbooks.bsky.social 2024
April Fool’s Day is Huntigowk Day in Scotland (“gowk” is a cuckoo &, by extension, a foolish person)
https://tippermuirbooks.co.uk/product/william-soutar-collected-works-vols-1-2/
Ain't no joke! (see what we did there..) looking forward to attending @scottishcolin #GamesTalksLive tomorrow in #Edinburgh, hopefully see some of you there! #Games #GameDev #Scotland #VideoGames #Scottish
Ain't no joke! (see what we did there..) looking forward to attending @scottishcolin #GamesTalksLive tomorrow in #Edinburgh, hopefully see some of you there! #Games #GameDev #Scotland #VideoGames #Scottish
Ain't no joke! (see what I did there..) looking forward to attending @scottishcolin #GamesTalksLive tomorrow in #Edinburgh, hopefully see some of you there! #Games #GameDev #Scotland #VideoGames #Scottish
Free ebook editions of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, & a linked index to all the stories in all twelve volumes, are available to download from @gutenberg_org
6/6
“The taste of the world, which has veered so often, is constant enough to fairy tales… we are still repeating to the boys and girls of each generation the stories that were old before Homer sang…”
—from Andrew Lang’s Introduction to THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK (1889)
5/6
“I have three extra physical sets and I travel with an ebook version of them in my iPad. These stories started their journey with me when I was very young.”
—Guillermo del Toro on Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books
4/6
“To me, Lang himself is a hero of literature. Besides being the champion of Robert Louis Stevenson & Haggard, he was the first critic to produce a study of Kipling’s work, found a publisher for the young Arthur Conan Doyle’s first major novel… & repeatedly informed the English that Mark Twain was one of the world’s great writers”
—Michael Dirda on Andrew Lang, in the Washington Post
3/6
“His own fairy narratives, however, and their success in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, suggest… that fairies persist, & become figures of fascination in this period, not because they offer an escape into the past, but because they speak powerfully, if indirectly, about present concerns”
—Andrew Teverson on Andrew Lang & the Fairies
2/6
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/12/a-shy-and-fugitive-people-andrew-lang-and-the-fairies/
Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was born #OTD, 31 March. An extraordinarily prolific anthropologist, writer & literary critic, he is best remembered today for collecting & editing fairy stories from around the world
A 
1/6
Our baby’s heart, on the sixteen-week scan
was a fluttering bird, held in cupped hands…
—Kathleen Jamie, “vii. Prayer”
from the poem sequence “Ultrasound”, first published in JIZZEN (Picador, 2011)
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/kathleen-jamie/jizzen/9781447218234
On Monday she stood at the wooden wash-tub,
Suds to the elbow,
A slave among the storm-gray shirts and sheets…
—George Mackay Brown, “The Mother”
published in TRAVELLERS, Hachette 2014
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/none/travellers/9781848549487/
Is tu riamh an ceann do dhleastanais,
mu chòcaireachd, caoraich, leabhraichean;
a bheil fios an d’fhuair thu do dhìol
airson do dheataim is spàirn is sgìths?
—Meg Bateman, “Màthair”
from Soirbheas/Fair Wind, Polygon Books 2007
One swipe of the sonogram
and the midwife had the sex predicted…
—Janette Ayachi, “New Mother”
published in HAND OVER MOUTH MUSIC (Liverpool University Press, 2019)
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781786942142
She is tougher than me, harder.
Elephant body on a miniature stool
keels when rising till the drilled stick
plants it upright…
—Iain Crichton Smith, “For My Mother”
from New Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2011)
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857549607
“For if we do find answers for how to brave the present, with its floods and fires, and still keep the faith, they won’t come from us alone. They will come from the strength that results from a tightened weave, story after story, between ourselves and our places.”
—from Jenny Odell’s Afterword to the US edition of Nan Shepherd’s THE LIVING MOUNTAIN, published in 2025 by Scribner
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/living-moutain-jenny-odell-essay/
I hear your bold blackbird, that slow singer,
alone at my desk yet walking with you
through your valleys and hills, that shining
stream bubbling notes of your music
your pure Welsh music…
—Sheila Templeton, “For R.S. Thomas”
published in A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening: New Writing Scotland 30
The Welsh poet Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913–2000) was born #OTD, 29 March.
As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify & who she could idolise. Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry & prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life
