WayWORD Festival 2022

Sir Herbert Grierson Centre director Professor David Wheatley will open this year’s WayWORD cross-arts Literary festival with a discussion of his new novel Stretto published by CB Editions in 2022. David’s event will be held at the Main Hall, King’s Pavilion on Tuesday 20th September at 5:30pm.

The WayWORD festival is now in its third year as a continuing youth and student run event emerging from its predecessor MayFest, and is co-ordinated by our friends over at the WORD Centre for Creative Writing.

There’s a great line up including headliner Raymond Antrobus, poet and children’s author, and winner of the Ted Hughes Award and Rathbones Folio Prize. Antrobus is a deaf poet with British-Jamaican heritage and was elected as a member of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. You can hear Antrobus read and discuss new work on Sat. 24th at 5:30 pm in the Main Hall, King’s Pavilion.

There is also Scottish Theatre Director Debbie Hannon in conversation with Dr. Lucie Hinnie, poets Michael Pederson and Padraig Regan with Naush Sabah, as well novelists Douglas Stuart and Monica Ali. And not to forget Scots Language Awards Scots poet of the year Lesley Benzie featuring with Noon Salah Eldin as part of the Wanderlust Women event on Thursday 22nd September.

Events will also take place across the city and the much-loved Blue Lamp will see an array of Northeast Writers perform with spoken word artists alongside members of Chamber Music Scotland.

There’s a real mix of truly cross-arts panels, readings, workshops and events this year, fully back in person for the first time since the pandemic and the festival’s predecessor MayFest.

Tickets are free and a full line up can be found in the link here.

You can also listen to an interview with WORD centre director Helen Lynch with current WayWORD student intern Bea Livesey-Stephens on the SLLMVC podcast From the Old Brewery here.

Deep Wheel Aberdonia

Deep Wheel Aberdonia is an event celebrating writing from and about Scottish islands with special guest Harry Josephine Giles. We take our title from Harry Josephine Giles’s recently published verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia, in which Orkney and its language are taken on a strange science-fiction journey, carving out a radical new space for Scottish writing.

The event will be chaired by Centre co-director Professor David Wheatley and feature two other readers, both PhD students at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture. Writer Ian Grosz will share work coming out of a recent residency on the Isle of Lewis, and Orcadian poet Ingrid Leonard will read from her recently-published pamphlet Rammo in Stenness (Abersee Press).

To learn a little more, go to the events page here.

Wednesday 4 May 2022: 12-2pm, Lower Ground Seminar Room, Sir Duncan Rice Library

Scottish Language, Literature and Identity

image courtesy of The Scottish Poetry Library

In a week when the fabulous Kathleen Jamie has been announced as the new Makar, we thought we’d share this discussion from ‘Free Thinking‘ in 2015, where Jamie is joined by Lewis academic, writer and broadcaster Peter Mackay, the cultural historian Murray Pittock and writer Janice Galloway on Scottish language, literature and identity.

Tales of Scotland: A Nation and its Literature.

Photography Writing Prize

A cash prize offered by Source Magazine for writing on photography, leading to publication and potential further commission. Details here.

Jana Prikryl Poetry Event

On 19th May we were delighted to host a live reading and discussion with poet Jana Prikryl. Jana is the author of No Matter (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) and The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016), which were each named in The New York Times Best Poetry Books of the Year listings. Her poems have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Granta, and Harper’s. Her essays can be found mainly in The New York Review of Books and The Nation.

Prikryl has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Yaddo, and a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Born in Czechoslovakia, she was a child when her family fled to Austria and came to Canada as refugees in the early 1980s. She works as a senior editor and poetry editor at The New York Review of Books.

If you missed our live event you can view a recording of it here.

Jana Prikryl Event

The Grierson Centre is delighted to welcome Jana Prikryl for a live reading and discussion on 19th May, chaired by PhD student and poet Ingrid Leonard at the School of LLMVC. 

Jana Prikryl is the author of two collections of poetry, The After Party (2016) and No Matter (2019). She was born in Ostrava, the Czech Republic, and now lives in New York where she is the executive editor of the New York Review of Books. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The reading and discussion will be live streamed and is a free event open to all. To register for the event please use our contact form here, stating your wish to attend in the body of your message. 

New work by Martin Malone

Following on from our interview with Martin Malone in February 2021, we are pleased to be able to feature one of a new sequence of forthcoming poems. The new work is based around Martin’s home in Gamrie in the north east of Scotland and will feature the art of Bryan Angus. You can read Martin’s work here which includes a link to his interview.

Cliff Forshaw

We are delighted to publish a preview of Cliff Forshaw’s current work in progress, French Leave, a sequence of versions and perversions of French poems by Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Apollinaire and others. 

Cliff Forshaw’s recent books include Satyr (Shoestring Press, 2017) – a topical satirical sequence illustrated by his paintings and drawings – and Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015), which travels from Hull to Vietnam and back, by way of Israel, Transylvania, California and Cambodia, continuing the voyages he embarked upon in Wake (Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, 2009).

Cliff is a painter as well as an academic and poet. His paintings have appeared in various exhibitions, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2020. You can read his most recent work through our poetry page, here.

Podcast with Professor Cairns Craig discussing Sir Herbert Grierson’s legacy

As part of the Aberdeen University 525 Years in the Pursuit of Truth podcast series which celebrates the university’s 525 year history, The Grierson Centre’s founding director Professor Cairns Craig talks about the influence of Sir Herbert Grierson.

You can listen to the podcast here in Episode 7.

Interview with Poet Martin Malone

INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN MALONE

Aberdeen University has links with more than a few poets, resident and otherwise, and in this, the first interview in a series, we had chance to catch up with Gamrie based poet, Martin Malone, whose work ranges far beyond the tight confines of Gardenstown’s cliff-nestled streets. 

Martin is an honorary teaching fellow at Aberdeen University and at the time of writing, he has published three collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011), Cur (Shoestring, 2015) and The Unreturning (2019). 

We talked to him about his new selected poems Larksong Static, published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2020, gaining a fascinating insight into Martin’s thinking on place, identity, the male gaze, and his re-imagining of the First World War. We also had opportunity to learn more about his influences, his love of music, his collaborations and forthcoming work. 

You can read the interview with Martin here.