Peter Mackay, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie and Brian Holton for Irish Pages: "Scotland" (Vol 12, No 2)

We are delighted to be hosting four Scottish poets to celebrate the "Scotland" edition of Irish Pages. We will be joined by Peter MacKay, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie. The conversation will be chaired by Chris Agee.

Each "Includes Book" voucher is fully redeemable against copies of Irish Pages: "Scotland" (Vol 12, No 2)

Ten years after the Independence Referendum, Irish Pages asks diverse Scottish writers of distinction – established, mid-career and new – to think about their country, and take stock of the current state of its culture and polity, language and literature, ecology and environment, while a specially curated selection of Scotland’s emerging poets will offer a younger perspective. How will Scotland fare in an era of momentous and unpredictable political change? Stands Scotland where it did?

Peter Mackay (Pàdraig MacAoidh) was born in the Isle of Lewis in 1979. He has an MLitt from University of Glasgow and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. His poetry pamphlets and collections are From Another Island (Clutag 2010), Gu Leòr / Galore (Acair, 2015) and Nàdur De / Some Kind of (Acair, 2021). He has co-edited poetry anthologies: An Leabhar Liath (Luath, 2016), 100 Dàn as Fheàrr Leinn (Luath, 2020), and The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (Canongate, 2021). He is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the School of English at University of St Andrews. He was appointed Makar (Scotland’s Nation Poet) in December 2024. He lives in Edinburgh.

Don Paterson is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, memoir and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, three Forward Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He has long had a parallel career as a jazz guitarist. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward Prize. The Bonniest Company won the 2015 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. Her non-fiction essays are collected in the three highly regarded books: Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing, all regarded as important contributions to the “new nature writing”. In 2024 she published Cairn, “a view from the strange here-and-now”, and The Keelie Hawk, a collection of poems in Scots. Between 2010 and 2020 Kathleen was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling, and from 2021–24 she served as Scotland’s Makar, or National Poet. Kathleen’s interests include archaeology, nature and environment, travel and art. She is the Scottish Editor of Irish Pages.

Brian Holton, born in Galashiels in 1949, and educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Durham, has published more than twenty books and pamphlets of translated poetry, including Yang Lian’s Venice Elegy (Edizioni Damocle, 2019) and Narrative Poem (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). In 2021, he was awarded the inaugural Sarah McGuire Prize for Poetry Translation for Yang Lian’s Anniversary Snow (Shearsman Books, 2019). Holton’s collection of classical poems in Scots, Staunin Ma Lane, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016, and his Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds: Li Bai an Du Fu in Scots by Taproot Press in early 2022. Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds was nominated for Scots Book of the Year, Scots Language Awards 2022. His latest book of translations from the Classical Chinese, Aa Cled Wi Clouds She Cam: 60 Lyrics frae the Chinese (Translations in Scots and English), was published by The Irish Pages Press in 2022.

Chris Agee is a poet, essayist, photographer, editor and publisher. He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His third collection of poems, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018. He is the Publisher and Editor of Irish Pages and The Irish Pages Press, and edited Balkan Essays, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, published simultaneously in Croatian by the Zagreb publishing house Fraktura. His “poetic work of non-fiction” on the President’s first term, Trump Rant, was published in 2021. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.