Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod is a novelist, poet and the editor of the SPL’s online anthology Best Scottish Poems 2015. We caught up with Ken last year to talk about the slim volume he’d just published, Poems, a collaboration with his friend, fellow Scot and poet/novelist Iain Banks. Banks, who died in 2013, has suggested co-publishing their poetry before his death, but the book’s appearance took on a new significance when it became clear it was going to be his last one. Ken discusses Poems’ genesis, the poets who turned him and the young Banks onto poetry, and the limericks that gave him the courage to take on T.S. Eliot with a poem that talks back to The Waste Land.