Janice Mackay
Janice Mackay won the Scottish Children’s Book Award 2013 with her novel – The Accidental Time Traveller.
Debi Gliori
Photograph: Cat and Fiddle by Kim Ayres
Debi Gliori is well known for her picture books and her novels for children and has been shortlisted for many major prizes, including the Kate Greenaway Award (twice) and the Scottish Arts Council Award. She published her first book in 1990 and has published so many successful books since that she has lost count, including No Matter What, The Trouble with Dragons, Stormy Weather, The Scariest Thing of All, Dragon Loves Penguin and the Tobermory Cat.
John Love
Born in Inverness and a graduate in Zoology from Aberdeen University, John Love managed the Sea Eagle Reintroduction for the Nature Conservancy Council on the Isle of Rum from 1975-
In 1992 he was appointed Area Officer for Scottish Natural Heritage covering the Uists, Barra and St Kilda until he retired in 2006. He still lives in South Uist and works as a freelance author, also giving illustrated lectures about the Hebrides and his travels to many parts of the world, islands and seabirds being particular passions.
Peter Urpeth
Peter Urpeth is a pianist, harmonium player and composer working mostly in jazz, theatre music and alternative performance art forms. Over the past 30 years he has worked with leading protagonists in film, theatre and literature including some of Europe’s finest improvising musicians.
In 2011 and 2012 he was commissioned by Faclan provide live accompaniment to two dark but very different classics of early cinema, Nosferatu and Vampyr – and in 2014 to The Passion of Joan of Arc. Silent movies are in his blood: his aunt, Constance Urpeth, was a performer in cinemas throughout London during the heyday of the silent movie era.
As well as being a musician, Peter is a novelist and poet. His first novel ‘Far Inland’ was published by Birlinn Polygon in 2006.
Malachy Tallack
Malachy Tallack is from Shetland. His debut, Sixty Degrees North, was an exploration of the landscapes and cultures of the sixtieth parallel, and tackled that most challenging of questions: what does it mean to be at home? His new book, The Un-Discovered Islands, is concerned with the geography of the mind, introducing an archipelago of mythical, phantom and fraudulent islands. Malachy is a writer, singer-songwriter and contributing editor of The Island Review.
Lily Greenall
Lily is a writer from the Isle of Lewis. She is currently working on a PhD on the supernatural in Scottish folklore at the University of Aberdeen.
Julie Brook
Julie Brook makes large-scale sculptural work outside using different materials, photography and film. She studied art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford and has lived and worked in remote landscapes from the west coast of Jura and Mingulay, Outer Hebrides to the Libyan desert and North West Namibia. This years she featured in a major BBC4 documentary on British Land Art.
James Macdonald Lockhart
James Macdonald Lockhart is an associate editor of, and regular contributor to, Archipelago Magazine. He is also a literary agent.
Kevin Macneil
Kevin MacNeil was born and raised in Lewis, of Maclean and MacNeil stock. A multi award-winning poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and editor, he has written five books and edited a similar number. MacNeil is published internationally and has taught creative writing at the universities of Uppsala, Edinburgh and Kingston.
Donald S Murray
Donald S Murray has been described as having ‘one of the most original and innovative voices in contemporary Scottish Literature’. Raised in Ness, Isle of Lewis, a weaver’s son, he went to the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway before going to Glasgow University. He returned to be a Teacher of English in the NI and Sgoil Lionacleit, Benbecula, before moving to Shetland.
Featured innumerous publications and Scottish literary magazines, his poetry and pross been anthologised in national collections while his short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland and – as a Gaelic speaker – BBC Radio Nan Gaidheal. Lately, among other programmes, he appeared on the BBC 4’s Birds Britannia.
His works include ‘The Guga Stone’ with visual artist Doug Robertson; Weaving Songs; ‘Between Minch and Muckle Flugga; Praising the Guga; Speak To Us Catriona; The Guga Hunters; Special Deliverance; Small Expectations; And On This Rock, Italian Chapel, Orkney’