Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Beverley Bie Brahic

Beverley Bie Brahic is a Canadian poet and translator who lives in Paris, France and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her translations include Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. Suzannah V. Evans spoke with her at StAnza 2020, where she discussed how translating poetry inspires her own work, owning a secret shelf of erotic literature, and being a ‘selfish translator’.

Nancy Campbell

Nancy Campbell is a poet and non-fiction writer who grew up in the Scottish Borders. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 has resulted in many projects responding to environmental concerns including How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award 2015) and Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016 and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize). Carol Ann Duffy describes Disko Bay as ‘a beautiful debut from a deft, dangerous and dazzling new poet writing from the furthest reaches of both history and climate change’.
In 2018 Nancy was appointed the Canal Laureate, a project managed by The Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. Many of the poems written during this residency were installed along the waterways where they could be seen projected onto warehouses at night, stencilled onto towpaths, or cemented into new fish gates. The poems are collected in Navigations, a pamphlet published by HappenStance Press. 
In 2020 Nancy received the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award for the popularisation of geography through literature. She is currently working on a translation of traditional Greenlandic songs.
In our latest podcast, she talks to Suzannah V. Evans at StAnza, Scotland’s poetry festival.

William Bonar

In this podcast Jennifer Williams interviews poet William Bonar about the publication of his most recent pamphlet, Offering (Red Squirrel Press, 2015).  They also discuss the mythology of memory, Hugh MacDiarmid’s influence on Scots language poetry and a walk through the frozen cradle of Scotland. 
William Bonar was born in Greenock and grew up in the neighbouring shipbuilding town of Port Glasgow. He is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde and he gained a distinction on the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University in 2008. He retired after working in education for 30 years and is a full-time writer. He is a founder member of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, Glasgow’s network of poets.

Sophie Collins

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to Sophie Collins about experimenting with starting points for creating poems, including using online translators and working with the unconscious; feminism and her role as co-editor of tender, a journal celebrating writing by women and the wide-ranging world of poetry translation from radical to faithful; and much more!
Sophie Collins is also editor of translation anthology Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016). She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2014.

Shara McCallum

In this podcast Jennifer Williams speaks to Jamaican-born, American-based poet Shara McCallum about her new Robert Burns poetry project which brought her to Scotland for a research visit; the lyric self; female and minority voices in poetry and much more.
Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, the latest of which is Madwoman.

Sarah Howe

In this podcast, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe talks to Jennifer Williams about kicking off the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, writing with multiple languages and alphabets, sense and non-sense in poetry and much more.
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ploughshares and Poetry, and she has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4.
If you would prefer to read, rather than listen to, our podcast with Sarah Howe, click here to see a transcript of the interview.

Nora Gomringer at StAnza

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams meets Nora Gomringer just after her Poetry Centre Stage reading at Scotland’s International Poetry Festival StAnza 2016. They talk about poetry on TV, how poetry can and should include a multiplicity of tones and registers, the joy of bringing poetry alive through the body and much more. Gomringer was born in 1980. Her background is in page-related poetry and spoken word, her present is the vast variety of poetry and recitation.
This podcast was recorded in cooperation with Scotland’s International Poetry Festival StAnza 2016 and with Literature Across Frontiers as part of the Literary Europe Live project supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
If you would prefer to read, rather than listen to, our podcast with Nora Gomringer, click here to see a transcription of the interview.

Linda Russo

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams speaks to American poet Linda Russo about the complexities of writing a poetry of place, the challenges and rewards of creating with empathy, and the question, ‘why aren’t we giving up hope?’.
Linda Russo is the author of two books of poetry, Mirth (Chax Press) and Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way, and a collection of literary-geographical essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, selected by John D’Agata as winner of the Subito Press lyric essay prize. Participant, winner of the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize (Lost Roads Press), is forthcoming. Scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation). She lives in the Columbia River Watershed (eastern Washington State, U.S.A.) and teaches at Washington State University.

Literary Europe Live: Juana Adcock and Árpád Kollár

In this podcast Jennifer Williams speaks to our New Voices from Europe Literary Europe Live SPL Poets in Residence Juana Adcock and Árpád Kollár about writing poetry while listening to Hungarian punk music, the definition of Spanglish, how to write multi-lingual poems and much more.  This project was made possible by Literary Europe Live, Literature Across Frontiers and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Isobel Dixon

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to the poet Isobel Dixon about the universal and the particular, collaboration and making space in a busy schedule to write, how to bring in the personal in poetry and much more.
Please note: unfortunately there is a buzz from a mobile signal through some short sections of this podcast. We hope it won’t detract from your enjoyment in listening. Many thanks.
Isobel Dixon was born in South Africa. She studied in Edinburgh, and now lives in Cambridge and works as a literary agent in London, returning frequently to Cape Town and her family home in the Karoo. Her fourth collection Bearings is published by Nine Arches, along with re-issues of A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator (later in 2016). Her new pamphlet, The Leonids, is published by Mariscat. She has been published in The Paris Review, The Manhattan Review, The Guardian, The Dark Horse and Prairie Schooner, among other publications.
Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast.