Date/Time
Date(s) - Tue 17th Jun, 2025
7:30pm - 8:30pm
Highland Book Prize Longlist Event: Beyond with Colin Bramwell and Gerda Stevenson
In this special online event, editors Colin Bramwell and Gerda Stevenson will read and discuss poems from Beyond (Shearsman Books, 2023), the second and last English-language poetry collection by the late Aonghas MacNeacail.
Beyond collects poetry from throughout Aonghas’s career, though mainly focuses on previously unpublished work. The collection includes an introduction by Colin and an explanation from Gerda as to the origin of Aonghas’s name.
This event is part of a series celebrating the Highland Book Prize 2024 Longlist, supported by the William Grant Foundation. You can read more about the longlist here.
Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-2022) was a legendary poet from Uig in Skye. A leading voice in Scottish poetry, Aonghas was particularly well-known as a Gaelic poet, though he also wrote in Scots and English. He is known as a modernising figure for poetry in Gaelic, and many of his poems have passed into the canon of Scottish literature. His accolades include the 1997 Stakis prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, and the Saltire Society’s 2015 premier award.
Colin Bramwell is from Fortrose on the Black Isle, and currently lives in Edinburgh. He writes in English and Scots. His co-translations of the Taiwanese poet Ko-hua Chen won the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize; he was runner up for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Colin’s work has appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Irish Pages, The London Magazine, Magma, New Writing Scotland, The Rialto, Poetry Scotland and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Poetry London. His latest collection, Fower Pessoas, was published by Carcanet in February 2025.
Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning writer, actor, director and singer-songwriter, working in theatre, television, opera, radio and film throughout the UK and abroad. Her play, Federer Versus Murray, toured to New York, sponsored by the Scottish Government, and her first two poetry collections, If This Were Real, and Quines: Poems in Tribute to Women of Scotland, have also been published in Rome in Italian translations. Other publications include a book of short stories, Letting Go, and a third poetry collection, Tomorrow’s Feast. She was nominated as Scots Singer of the Year for her album of songs, Night Touches Day. The founder of Scotland’s leading women’s theatre company STELLAR QUINES, she has directed and appeared in many theatre productions and films, including Braveheart, winning a BAFTA for her performance in Margaret Tait’s feature film Blue Black Permanent. www.gerdastevenson.co.uk
Fees
We are running this as a ‘pay as you can’ event. Please see our booking options below. By paying our standard price wherever possible you help us give people on lower incomes more opportunities to attend, thank you.
We have a limited number of free places for this event, if these are showing as not available and you need a free place to be able to access the event, please email a request to us on online@moniackmhor.org.uk, thank you.
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