April showcase

Our next Mirrorball Showcase takes place on Thursday 25^th April, 7-9pm in person at the CCA with a wonderful line-up of poets: Marjorie Lotfi, Marion McCready, Nuala Watt, Rebecca Farmer, Alan Riach, and Mary Thomson.

Marjorie Lotfi is an Iranian-American who has lived in the UK for over 20 years. She’s a winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize, and her first collection The Wrong Person to Askwas published by Bloodaxe Books in October. She’s regularly commissioned to write new work, most recently The World May Be the Same with Hannah Lavery (supported by The Edwin Morgan Trust) and also writes and performs regularly with the 12 Collective of women writers.  Marjorie is a Co-Founder and Director of Open Book, which runs over 1,000 shared reading and creative writing workshops each year across Scotland, the Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees for StAnza and an editor for New Writing Scotland.  

Marion McCready is a poet and psychotherapist living in Dunoon, Argyll with her husband and two children. Her poems have been published widely including in Poetry (Chicago), Edinburgh Review, The Glasgow Herald and have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her pamphlet collection Vintage Sea was published by Calder Wood Press. She is the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and is the author of two poetry collections from Eyewear Publishing: Tree Language (2014) andMadame Ecosse (2017). Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.   

Nuala Watt lives and works in Glasgow. Her poems have appeared in anthologies includingStairs and Whispers: D/Deaf and Disabled Writers Write Back (Nine Arches Press 2017), A Year of Scottish Poems (Pan Macmillan 2018) and To Mind Your Life: Poems for Nurses and Midwives (Polygon/Scottish Poetry Library 2021). Poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Recent work was featured in Atrium and Bad Lilies. ‘Important Information Enclosed’ appears in the Poetry Archive’s Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2023 collection. Current interests include visual impairment as a creative context and the relationship between disability and parenthood.

Rebecca Farmer’s most recent pamphlet A Separate Appointment was published by New Walk Editions in November 2022. Her pamphlet Not Really won the Poetry Business competition judged by Carol Ann Duffy and is published by Smith Doorstop. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University where her dissertation was on Louis MacNeice’s later poems and his work at the BBC. She continues to research MacNeice and a recent article appeared in the London Magazine. She has been a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library and a Hawthornden Fellow. Her poems have been published in a number of journals including: Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Poetry Review, The London Magazine,The Spectator, The North, The Strokestown Anthology and The New Statesman.

Alan Riach. Poet and Professor of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University. Born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow, worked at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, 1986-2000, returned to Scotland 2001. Books include poetry: The MacDiarmid Memorandum (2023), The Winter Book (2017), Wild Blue: Selected Poems(2014) and Homecoming (2009); and criticism: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (1991),Representing Scotland (2005), and co-authored with Alexander Moffat, Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2008), described in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a landmark book’, and Arts of Independence: The Cultural Argument and Why It Matters Most (2014). His 734-page Scottish Literature: An Introduction (2022) was described in The Times as ‘magisterial’.

Mary Thomson has lived many lives since she left her Cheshire farm childhood behind at 18. One-time gallery owner and art critic, since she came to Scotland in 2006 she has published eight pamphlets (three of which were shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Poetry Pamphlet Award) and her poems have appeared in many publications. Her collection of poems, Still Dancing, was published by Red Squirrel Press in October 2023 on her 80^thbirthday. ‘This is poetry that hinges on reminiscence, but makes it relevant to the world today… Mary’s work engages place to achieve a time traveller’s delight, dipping in and out of past and present to future revelation and realisation.’ Marc Sherland

November 16th Mirrorball

A showcase of the best new Scottish poetry collections with: William Letford, supported by Marjorie Lofti, Andy Jackson, Eleanor Livingstone & Tracy Patrick.

Our next Mirrorball Showcase will be held in the CCA clubroom from 7pm-9pm on 16th November 2023, and will be live streamed on Zoom for members – thanks to our tech support, Mark Cunningham Guest price is £7 or £5 conc

William Letford first appeared in Carcanet’s New Poetries V (2011) and published his first collection of poetry, Bevel (2012), while working as a roofer. Since then, his work has been adapted into film, projected onto buildings, carved into monuments, adapted for the stage, written onto skin, cast out over the radio, and performed by orchestras. He has helped restore a Medieval village in the mountains of Northern Italy, taught English in Japan, fished with his bare hands in Indonesia, and been invited to perform in Iraq, South Korea, Lebanon, Australia, Germany, India, Poland, and many more countries. Billy now has three books published, all with Carcanet Press. The latest of these is From Our Own Fire which has just come out.

Marjorie Lotfi is an Iranian-American who has lived in the UK for over 20 years. She’s a winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize, and her first collection The Wrong Person to Ask was published by Bloodaxe Books in October. She’s regularly commissioned to write new work, most recently The World May Be the Same with Hannah Lavery (supported by The Edwin Morgan Trust) and also writes and performs regularly with the 12 Collective of women writers.  Marjorie is a Co-Founder and Director of Open Book, which runs over 1,000 shared reading and creative writing workshops each year across Scotland, the Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees for StAnza and an editor for New Writing Scotland.  

Andy Jackson is author of four poetry collections, including A Beginner’s Guide to Cheating (Red Squirrel Press, 2015) and The Saints Are Coming (Blue Diode, 2020). His new collection Games Night was published by Red Squirrel Press earlier this year. He is also editor of a dozen anthologies including Scotia Extremis with Brian Johnstone (Luath, 2019). Andy was Makar to the Federation of Writers Scotland in 2017. He is co-editor of the magazine Poetry Scotland, runs the Otwituaries blog and is currently developing the Lonely Funeral project in Scotland.

Eleanor Livingstone’s first full collection, Even the Sea, re-issued in 2023, was shortlisted for the 2010 inaugural London New Poetry award for first collections. Selections of poems from Even the Sea have been translated into six other languages. Her other publications include The Last King of Fife, A Sampler, and as editor Skein of Geese, Migraasje, Bridging the Continental Divide, Necessarily Looking Backward and The Arch. Her new collection, Surprising the Misses McRuvie, is from Red Squirrel Press, 2023. She lives in Fife where she worked as a paralegal and creative writing tutor before becoming Festival Director for StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival from 2010 to 2021.

Tracy Patrick‘s new pamphlet, Out of the North, published by Maytree Press, is an original long poem sequence based on the life of the Reverend Joseph Johnston in his letters to thePaisley & Renfrewshire Gazette during the First World War. Tracy is a former Clydebuilt mentee and has an MLitt from Glasgow University. She is the author of one novel, Blushing is for Sinners, and three poetry publications, Wild Eye Fire Eye, Portrait and Painting San Romano.