Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

The SPL is pleased to be able to share a treasure from our audio archives: from 2008, a talk by poet and novelist John Burnside on fellow Scottish poet W.S. Graham. During the talk, recorded at the National Library of Scotland before an audience, Burnside talks about poetry and visual art, the poet as nomad and 'feeding the dead'.

Volha or Volya Hapeyeva is a Belarusian poet and translator.Her new pamphlet In My Garden of Mutants, which will be published by Arc early next year, was translated by Annie Richardson, a translator based in Edinburgh.In the first podcast recorded during the lockdown, Annie talks from Scotland's capital and Volya from Austria about the joys of translation, Britain's lamentable record on learning foreign languages and whether now is the right time to be writing poems about the pandemic. Image taken by Zhanna Gladko.

Nancy Campbell is a writer of poetry, essays and non-fiction. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 has resulted in many projects responding to the environment, most recently The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019. Campbell’s first poetry collection Disko Bay was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016 and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. In 2018/19 she was appointed the UK’s Canal Laureate by the Canal & River Trust and The Poetry Society. In our latest podcast, Nancy Campbell talks to Suzannah V. Evans at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival.

Christopher Whyte is a poet and translator whose last collection, Step by Step, which is published by Acair, was runner-up in the 2019 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Prize. Whyte stopped off at the SPL towards the end of last year accompanied by his translator Petra Poncarova. Since Christopher Whyte’s Gaelic poetry first appeared in the 1980s, he has been an influential and sometimes controversial figure in the world of Gaelic writing. In Whyte’s work, poetry and language are inescapably political, bound up with questions of belonging, enfranchisement and equality. But he is also an intensely personal poet. During the course of our interview, he discusses how he came to learn Gaelic, why it is a language of resistance, and his relationships with several Scottish poetry greats such as Derrick Thomson, Sorley macLean and Edwin Morgan, with who he conducted a groundbreaking interview.

Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist based in south-east London. She has had poetry published in the LRB, Poetry London, Ambit, The Rialto, Poetry Daily, POEM, and the Moth among others. Her pamphlet Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity was published by Goldsmiths Press 2018. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling is published by Offord Road Books, and came out in April, 2020. Suzanna V Evans spoke with Ella Frears at the StAnza Poetry Festival in 2019. Frears reads her poems and discusses sand, vintage porn and the interplay between her roles as a writer and visual artist. Photo credit: Cat Goryn

This week's podcast features not one but two poets, both published by Blue Diode: Juana Adcock and Tessa Berring. Juana Adcock is a Mexican-born Scotland-based poet and translator who works in both English and Spanish. In her first book Manca, she explored her native country’s violence. Her translations have been published in Asymptote and Words Without Borders, and she has worked on translations for the British Council and Conaculta, Mexico’s council for culture and the arts. Tessa Berring is an Edinburgh-based artist and writer. Her poetry has recently appeared in Gutter Magazine, Magma, and The Rialto. In 2017 her poetry sequence Cut Glass and No Flowers was published by Chicago-based Dancing Girl Press. She is also 1/12 of '12', a women's poetry collective based in Scotland.

Before becoming a poet, Aileen Ballantyne was a journalist, and it's her former profession that informs her poetry, not least in a sequence of poems in her recently published collection Taking Flight that explore the aftermath of 1988's Lockerbie bombing, still the worst terrorist attack to take place on British soil. Ballantyne also reads poems about the moon landing and childhood flights to the USA.

In June 2019, poet, playwright and novelist Alan Spence performed at the Library to mark his first year as the Makar or Poet Laureate of Edinburgh. We recorded the event and present it to you now. During the performance he talks about some initial misgivings about how to make the post work, how he overcame those doubts, he reads many of the Edinburgh-based commissions he’s worked on during that first year and reads an ode to the former international Scottish rugby player Dodie Weir. A note on the sound – as it’s a recording of a live performance rather than our usual interview, the quality is a little more ragged than usual. So apologies for the odd seagull, car reversing and cough.

Over a decade has passed since Stewart Conn was Edinburgh's Makar or Poet Laureate, yet the city continues to exert its influence upon him. His latest collection Aspects of Edinburgh maps the city as well as his fascination with its buildings, history and people. Conn was born in 1936, growing up mainly in Kilmarnock, where his father was a minister. He worked at the BBC from 1962, mainly as a radio drama producer, becoming Head of Radio Drama, until he resigned in 1992. Publications include An Ear to the Ground (Poetry Book Society Choice); Stolen Light (shortlisted for the Saltire Prize), The Breakfast Room (2011 Scottish Poetry Book of the Year) and a new and selected volume The Touch of Time (Bloodaxe). In our latest podcast, Conn discusses his collaboration with illustrator John Knight, and how he was initially wary of writing about the capital because he isn't a native.

Tolu Agbelusi is a Nigerian British, poet, playwright, performer, educator and lawyer, with compelling story telling skills. Her work 'addresses the unperformed self, womanhood and the art of living. For our latest podcast Suzannah V. Evans interviewed Agbelusi at Stanza, Scotland's poetry festival, earlier this year. Agbelusi talks about building communities and empowering people through literature; she is the founder of Home Sessions, a development program and community for Black poets under 30.

To mark the centenary of Hamish Henderson's birth, we're joined by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, poet and Gaelic language advocate. He talks about Henderson's legacy as a writer and activist. He also discusses the Poets Republic, which has recently published a tribute volume in honour of Henderson, to which Mac an Tuairneir has contributed. He also talks about his own poetry and how he came to write in Gaelic.

Penny Boxall is the winner of the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the 2018 Mslexia / Poetry Book Society Poetry Competition. She's the author of two collections, Ship of the Line and Who Goes There?, both published by Valley Press. She was born in 1987 and grew up in Aberdeenshire and Yorkshire. We spoke earlier this year and at the time of the interview she was Development Manager at Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne’s house in the North York Moors. Jackie Kay, who was one of the judges the year Boxall won, said of her poetry: ‘Penny Boxall runs a tight ship. Her poems are beautifully crafted. Reading her is to go on an interesting journey of exploration—stopping at fascinating places along the way. She has a curator’s mind and is always putting one thing beside another in an unexpected way.’

To coincide with Niall O'Gallagher's appointment as Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu, Glasgow's Gaelic poet laureate, we present an interview with O'Gallagher. Niall O’Gallagher’s first book of poems, Beatha Ùr (Clàr), was published in 2013. Beatha Ùr continued Gaelic poetry’s long-running engagement with Scotland’s largest city. His second collection, Suain nan Trì Latha (2016), made this explicit in a series of poems, many addressed to the poet’s infant son, echoing classical Gaelic love lyrics. Although he's translated other's poetry from Gaelic to English, O’Gallagher has declined to translate his own poetry, preferring to rely on others, like Deborah Moffat and Peter Mackay, to produce English versions of his poems. During the podcast he talks about why he refuses to translate his own work, why Glasgow has always been a linguistic hub for Gaelic poetry, and what he plans to do as Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu.

This month Suzannah V Evans takes over as host; she's in conversation with Mary Jean Chan in an interview recorded at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival, earlier this year. Chan was born in 1990 and raised in Hong Kong before continuing her education at the Universities of Oxford and London. She's already been nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry's Best Single Poem category twice and earlier this year she was given an Eric Gregory Award. Her first full-length collection Flèche has just been published by Faber. During the podcast, Chan discusses fencing (where the term 'flèche' comes from), how learning English at a young age made her realise some languages are more valued than others, and queerness.

Our latest podcast departs from our usual interview format. It's a recording of a reading held in the Scottish Poetry Library in March. The poets featured are Nina Bogin, Eoghan Walls and Beverley Bie Brahic. Nina Bogin (pictured) was born in New York City and grew up on the north shore of Long Island. She attended Kirkland College and received a B.A. degree from New York University. She has lived in France since 1976. She taught English and literature at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard inFrance, until her retirement in 2017. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1989 and Graywolf Press published her first book of poems, In the North, that same year. Two books of poems followed, The Winter Orchards in 2001 and The Lost Hare in 2012, both published by Anvil Press. Her latest collection, Thousandfold, is published by Carcanet. Eoghan Walls was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. He attended Atlantic College on the coast of South Wales and has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda, Scotland and presently, northern England. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, an Irish Art's Council Bursary in 2009, and his work has been published widely in journals and anthologies throughout the UK and Ireland. His first collection of poems, The Salt Harvest, was published by Seren in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Strong Award for Best First Collection. He teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. His latest collection is Pigeon Songs, which is published by Seren. Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator. A Canadian, she lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize. Brahic’s translations include Guillaume Apollinaire's The Little Auto, winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize; and books by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.