Michael Pedersen

We look forward to welcoming award-winning Scottish poet and author of Boy Friends Michael Pedersen for his third poetry collection, The Cat Prince & Other Poems.

All moggy moxie , Pedersen croons to the beauty and devastation of love, loss, friendship, cats and careless joy. Equal parts tender and trenchant, raw and ribald, these poems exhibit an emotionally charged, fantastical playground of language and lore.

From the brutalising death of a cherished friend comes a gut-wrenching grief. And so begins a tenacious quest for light, lustre and survival as Pedersen pays tender tribute to a gorgeous, life-altering friendship. In doing so, he harks back to the hilarity of being young, reckless and petrified: memories of boys showboating in a fishing tackle shop, games of feline metamorphosis, and laments for demolished buildings.

As frisky as it is fierce, The Cat Prince pounces around the poet’s emotional and physical landscapes, past and present, unfankling a Scotland full of gothic splendour and nature’s majesty.

These poems reveal a poet at his bravest and most vulnerable. The Cat Prince & Other Poems purrs with affection, flashes its teeth, then digs in the claws.

The event will be chaired by Gemma Cairney, author (Canongate, Pan McMillan), broadcast & presenter (BBC Radio 1, BBC TV, Sky TV etc) and Chair of the Board at Edinburgh Art Festival.  We look forward to welcoming Michael & Gemma to Edinburgh, for what we're sure will be an enthralling evening of poetry.

MICHAEL PEDERSEN is a prize-winning Scottish poet, author and arts producer. His second collection, Oyster, was a collaboration with Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit. His poetic prose debut, Boy Friends, came out with Faber & Faber in 2022 in the UK and North America, and is now travelling into translation editions. Among other accolades, he won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and a John Mathers Trust Rising Star Award. Pedersen also co-founded Neu! Reekie!, a prize-winning arts collective who produced cutting-edge shows across the UK (and the world) for over a decade.