Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition

totally delighted that a new poem, 'The Kids', has made it to the shortlist of this year's Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition.

Things Unseen

Ooh – I've been a bit slack in my blog updates for a bit. Mostly because I've had my head down to commissions and getting my emerging poetry manuscript 'Byssus' ready to be seen by a few folk. Some of it – a sequence of poems about microscopic marine life – is included in Anne Bevan's new exhibition, which opens this Friday at the Bonhoga Gallery in Shetland. I've put a different head on this weekend: it's that happy time of year where Mary Blance (of BBC Radio Shetland's Books Programme) and I get to judge the Shetland Library's Young Shetland Writer competition. Some wonderful pieces of poetry and prose in there, and I'm excited as ever to see so much strong writing in Shetland Dialect. I'm interspersing my reading with renovations to a broken creel I found in the skip, and possibly some rope-making later.

I love

my new crocodile sweater, which is by the fantastic Shetland designer Nielanell...

Creative Writing Course at Wordplay 2012...

This year I'll be co-tutoring Shetland Arts' annual Creative Writing Course at Wordplay 2012 with Pam Beasant, a previous George Mackay Brown fellow in Orkney. We've honed our double-act at the St Magnus Festival for the past two years and are really looking forward to working together again in September. Trundle along to shetlandarts.org for more details...