Finlay Macleod
Fionnlagh Macleoid: Dealbh le Fiona Rennie
The event is in Gaelic with simultaneous translation available.
Madeleine Bunting
Madeleine Bunting is a former Guardian journalist. She read History at Cambridge and politics at Harvard. Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey is her fourth book and, appropriately, will be launched at Faclan this year.
The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre won the Portico Prize. She lives in London.
The event will be hosted by An Lanntair Chairman, David Green.
Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay was born and brought up in Scotland. The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe) won the Forward Prize, a Saltire prize and a Scottish Arts Council Prize. Fiere, her most recent collection of poems was shortlisted for the COSTA award. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the IMPAC award. Red Dust Road (Picador) won the Scottish Book of the Year Award, and the London Boo Award. It was shortlisted for the JR Ackerley prize. She was awarded an MBE in 2006, and made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. Her book of stories Wish I Was Here won the Decibel British Book Award.
She also writes for children and her book Red Cherry Red (Bloomsbury) won the Clype award. She has written extensively for stage and television. Her most recent plays Manchester Lines (produced by Manchester Library Theatre) and The New Maw Broon Monologues (produced by Glasgay) were a great success. Her most recent book is a collection of stories, Reality, Reality. She is currently working on her new novel, Bystander. She is Chancellor of the University of Salford and Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Kay
Jackie Kay was named Scots Makar – The National Poet for Scotland – in March 2016.
Marion Coutts
Marion Coutts is a lecturer in art at Goldsmith’s College in London. This is her first book. An extraordinary journey into life and death it was: –
- Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize 2015
- Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2014.
- Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2014.
- Shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Award 2014.
- Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2014.
Nick Abadzis
Nick Abadzis has been creating books, magazines, comics and stories for adults and children for nearly thirty years. As cartoonist and writer, he’s been honored with various international storytelling awards including an Eisner in 2008 for Laika. He is also an editorial consultant, corporate scribe and visual facilitator who has collaborated with large clients such as EY, KPMG, Accenture, Coca-Cola, IBM, General Electric, WOBI and many others.
He’s been published in the USA by Condé Nast, First Second, Marvel Comics, Titan Comics, DC Comics, in the UK by the BBC, various national newspapers including The Guardian, The Times and The Independent, and other periodicals too numerous to mention; elsewhere in Europe by the likes of Dargaud and Glénat, and In Japan by Kodansha. He currently writes Titan Comics’ ongoing monthly series, Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor to great acclaim – several collections have now been published with more to follow. He is British but based in and around New York City where he lives with his wife and daughter.
Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot has published her work with various magazines, journals and blogs and she has written a regular column for Caught by the River out of which The Outrun, her first book, has emerged to a chorus of critical acclaim. It was a Radio 4 Book of the Week in January and is shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize.
As well as writing for local newspaper, Orkney Today, and editing the Edinburgh Student newspaper, Amy has been an artist’s model, a trampolinist and has worked in a shellfish factory. This is her first book.
Philip Hoare
Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: His latest book, The Sea Inside, was published 2014. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011.
Ian Stephen
A writer, artist and storyteller from Lewis, Ian worked for 15 years in the coastguard service, based in Stornoway. Since 1995 he has worked full-time in the arts, after winning the inaugural Robert Louis Stevenson award. The practice of navigating through the geography of stories has been a key element of his work across the arts since a Creative Scotland Award in 2002. Ian was the first artist in residence at StAnza, Scotland’s annual poetry festival, creating a verse-blog from a winter voyage to Orkney in the week preceding the festival. Since then the poem as a track-record of your way through water or overland has also been a key element of his work.
His poetry and short fiction have been published in numerous UK journals, and in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the USA. His St Kilda lyrics were published in Berlin and a parallel text new and selected poems, in the Czech Republic. In 2016, Saraband published Maritime his selection from 35 years of making poetry from observing seaways and shorelines.
After the success of his first novel, the much-lauded A Book of Death & Fish, this return to poetry evokes the dramatic waterscapes, rocky shores and wind-blasted textures of his native Hebrides.
‘Absorbing and riveting… dense, compelling and wildly idiosyncratic… splits the form open like a fresh catch, glistening and raw and singing with the sea’ – Kirsty Gunn, Guardian