The Literature of
Orkney and Shetland

The Dialogues

The Dialogues

Archipelagos, Poems from Writing thew North (2.8MB)

Download Archipelagos
Poems from Writing the North (2.8MB PDF)

An important aspect of Writing the North is to explore continuities between the history of Orkney and Shetland writing and poets and novelists at work today. These dialogues are between academic specialists in Scottish literature and contemporary writers connected with the Northern Islands. Each partnership will explore a text or an extract of a longer work from the history of Northern Islands literature, and leads to a new, original piece of creative writing.

Some of the source texts are from well-known writers, some from ones you won’t have heard of; some are by native islanders, others by visitors; some are in standard English, some in dialect. There is some wonderful writing to discover, and you can read the source texts, follow the dialogues and creative process, and participate in the discussion by adding your own comments here. Each of the original pieces of writing has been collected into the book Archipelagos, together with associated commentary by the collaborative academic specialist. A downloadable version of Archipelagos is available here.

The Source Texts

Alison Lumsden

Alison Lumsden

Alison Lumsden is Professor in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. She is a General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, a scholarly edition of Scott's fiction in thirty volumes, and has edited and co-edited several volumes of that edition including The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Peveril of the Peak, and The Pirate, which is set in Orkney and Shetland. She has recently begun work on a scholarly edition of Scott's poetry. She is co-director of the Walter Scott Research Centre at the University of Aberdeen and has also worked on many aspects of Scottish literature. Walter Scott Research Centre http://www.abdn.ac.uk/english/centres/walterscott.php

Jen Hadfield

Jen Hadfield

Jen Hadfield is currently working on her third poetry book, Byssus, due out in 2014. She lives in Shetland. In her sometimes-chaotic creative life, walking, foraging for wild food and material for her visual art are as important as her language-centered practice. Audio samples of her work are available at www.poetryarchive.org She blogs intermittently at rogueseeds.blogspot.com

Da Blyde Maet
Source Text (PDF)

Alan Riach

Alan Riach

Alan Riach is the Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University and was President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2006-2010. Born Lanarkshire 1957, he is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid's Epic Poetry (1991), The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (1999), Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography (2005) and, with Alexander Moffat, Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2008), which the Times Literary Supplement described as 'a landmark book'. He is the author of five books of poems: This Folding Map (1990), An Open Return (1991), First & Last Songs (1995), Clearances (2001) and Homecoming (2009). He is the General Editor of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid and has co-edited Lion's Milk: Turkish Poems by Scottish Poets (2012), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2009), The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks by Wilson Harris (1993) and Scotlands: Poets and the Nation (2004) Formerly Associate Professor and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, he has been working in Scotland since 2001.

Morag MacInnes

Morag MacInnes

Morag MacInnes was born in Stromness. After living sooth and abroad, lecturing and working in community arts, and producing short stories poems and plays, she's now back home to investigate a very changed island. Her narrative poem cycle Alias Isobel (Hansel 2008) followed the story of an Orcadian cross dresser who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Other recent dialect poems appear in the anthology These Islands We Sing (Polygon 2011). Her new poetry collection Street Shapes, a collaboration with Orkney artist Diana Leslie, was launched at the end of April 2013.

Mark Smith

Mark Smith

Mark Smith works at the Shetland Archives and has recently finished a PhD about Shetland’s literature. He has published fiction, poetry and criticism in various magazines and websites, including PN Review, the Herald, Gutter Magazine and Bella Caledonia, and in anthologies from Two Ravens Press and Polygon. He is a member of the New Shetlander editorial committee.

Robert Alan Jamieson

Robert Alan Jamieson

Robert Alan Jamieson is a novelist and poet who grew up in Shetland, in the village of Sandness. He has tutored Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh since 1993, and was also a Creative Writing Fellow at the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. His most recent books are a collection of dialect poetry with English translations, 'Nort Atlantik Drift' (2008) and the novel 'Da Happie Laand' (2010), which was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize and the SMIT Scottish Book of the Year award, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin award.

Sarah Jane Gibbon

Sarah Jane Gibbon

Sarah Jane Gibbon was born in Orkney in 1976. She graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1998 with a Joint Honours Degree in Archaeology and History, following which in 2000 she completed a Research Masters in Norse Castles in Orkney. In 2006 she gained a PhD in archaeology from the UHI studying Orkney's medieval ecclesiastical landscape. She has worked as an archive assistant at Orkney Archives, lectured in Culture Studies and Archaeology at Orkney College, UHI, and co-led The Big Orkney Song Project. Sarah Jane now divides her time between self-employed historical and genealogical projects, archaeological projects with Orkney College, researching, writing and performing songs, helping her husband Robert with their farm, and most importantly, looking after their daughter Josie and baby son Jamie.

Alison Miller

Alison Miller

Alison Miller was born and grew up in Orkney before leaving for university in Aberdeen. She has lived and worked in Adult Education, Counselling & Group Work in Glasgow for most of her adult life. In 2003 she graduated with Distinction from the Creative Writing M.Litt run by Strathclyde and Glasgow universities. Her novel Demo published by Penguin in 2006, was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award. Alison has had fiction and poetry published in anthologies, stories broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and does occasional book reviews for the Herald and Scottish Review of Books. Currently she is Scottish Book Trust Reader in Residence in Orkney Library & Archive and produces a regular blog: http://readerinresidenceorkneylibrary.blogspot.co.uk/. She is also working on a novel, The Making of Veni Isbister, set in Orkney.

Penny Fielding

Penny Fielding

Penny Fielding teaches English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she is also director of the project for Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC). She has been visiting Orkney for many years but her interest in Northern Islands writing started when she was researching her book on the North in British Romanticism, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760-1830, and came across the work of the brilliant but neglected Shetland poet Margaret Chalmers. Penny has since then been collaborating with the Shetland Museum and Archives, resulting in the Writing the North project.

Pamela Beasant

Pamela Beasant

Pamela Beasant lives in Stromness, Orkney. She has been widely published as a poet and non-fiction writer, and was the first George Mackay Brown fellow in 2007, and the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poet Partner in Orkney in 2008-10. Publications and commissions include the poetry collections Running with a Snow Leopard (Two Ravens Press), Orkney; a Celebration of Light and Landscape (with photographer Iain Sarjeant), the biography Stanley Cursiter; a Life of the Artist, and anthologies 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems (Luath, edited by Stewart Conn) and These Islands We Sing (Polygon, edited by Kevin MacNeil). Pamela has had three scripts performed at the St Magnus International Festival, for whom she is director of the Orkney Writers’ Course with co-tutor Jen Hadfield. Her play, Long Strides, was commissioned by the St Magnus International Festival and will be performed in 2013.

Linden Bicket

Linden Bicket

Dr Linden Bicket is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In 2011 she received her doctorate, 'A God-ordained web of creation': The faithful fictions of George Mackay Brown', from the University of Glasgow. This was shortlisted for the Ross Roy medal for best PhD in a field relating to Scottish Literature. From 2011-12 she worked as research assistant on the project, 'George Mackay Brown: A Literary Executor's Archive'. This project was funded by a British Academy Small Grant, and meant that Linden spent six weeks in Orkney in order to catalogue and create the first archive of the manuscripts that Brown left to his literary executor after his death. This new catalogue of Brown materials provides an exciting new insight into his creative process, and forms the first single archival collection of his work in his native Orkney Islands. A digital catalogue of this material is now available on Orkney Library's website. It can be found here: http://www.orkneylibrary.org.uk/assets/GMB%20Collection%20D124.pdf

Yvonne Gray

Yvonne Gray

Yvonne Gray lives near Stromness. She is a writer, musician and flying teacher, working on Sanday three days a week and studying for the MLitt in Highlands and Islands Literature at the Centre for Nordic Studies, UHI. Under the imprint of Braga Press, she has published limited edition, hand stitched pamphlets of Orkney writing including Memories of Lambholm and its Chapel, a reprint of a letter by Domenico Chiocchetti describing the creation of the Italian Chapel. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Cencrastus, New Writing Scotland (ASLS) and These Islands, We Sing (Polygon, 2011). She was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Bursary in 2002 and her collection, In the Hanging Valley, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2008. Reflections (Hansel Cooperative Press and Woodend Publishing, 2012), a collection of her poems with drawings by artist John Cumming, was shortlisted for the Callum MacDonald Memorial Award 2013.

Penny Fielding

Penny Fielding

Penny Fielding teaches English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she is also director of the project for Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC). She has been visiting Orkney for many years but her interest in Northern Islands writing started when she was researching her book on the North in British Romanticism, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760-1830, and came across the work of the brilliant but neglected Shetland poet Margaret Chalmers. Penny has since then been collaborating with the Shetland Museum and Archives, resulting in the Writing the North project.

Raman Mundair

Raman Mundair

Raman Mundair is a writer and artist. She is the author of A Choreographer's Cartography, Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves and The Algebra of Freedom. In 2013 she will be a Leverhulme Artist in Residence for Shetland Museum and Archives. She is a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award nominee, a Robert Louis Stevenson Award winner and was identified by the BBC/Royal Court Theatre as one of the 'next generation of promising new writers in Britain' (24 Degrees Project). Raman was chosen as one of two British writers to participate in the Word Express, Literature Across Frontiers project. Word Express took 20 young writers from 12 European countries by train through South-East Europe to Turkey, where they took part in readings and literary events in every country they passed through. Her artworks have been exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow and City Art Gallery, Leicester. Raman's video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWmWGCDU5ak

Alex Thomson

Alex Thomson

Alex Thomson is a senior lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is also Postgraduate Director of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and co-director of the Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century research project. He has interests in a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth century literature and philosophy, and has published books on Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno. He is currently editing Stevenson’s Memories and Portraits for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Jim Mainland

Jim Mainland

Jim Mainland is from Shetland, where he teaches English at Brae High School. His collection ‘A Package of Measures’ was published in 2002 and his poetry and prose can be found in various anthologies, magazines and online.