Entering the space at GENERATOR to explore Michael Curran’s new exhibition on Muriel Spark, The Public Image (Scottish Lady Tiger), one notices how large the gallery feels, with empty spaces between each exhibit. In fact, the Generator Chairperson and curator of the exhibition, Hari MacMillan, explained that the space had been designed deliberately to echo Read More
Bute Noir is a three-day crime writing festival held in the town of Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, a short ferry from Glasgow. Despite being one of the smaller venues for such a festival, the island can hold its own in the field, with some of the most respected authors of this genre attending Read More
“You’re spot on time. Isn’t that good?” Fiona Kidman is warm and merry, bright as a button. She takes me through her kitchen and into the dining room, stopping to point out the view from her window. “Can you see the lights? That’s the airport above the sea, Wellington.” In Wellington, New Zealand, it’s 9.00 Read More
Stung by winter’s salt and grit his cold paws barely grip the icy pavement still he won’t cross to the sunny side, hangs his head when I reach out to tug his collar, leans away from me, his body a counterweight keeping us both upright on the ice linked by my outstretched arm, my hold Read More
Find as far inland as Kintyre can allow, map back to an almost-anywhere dot. Out of seasight. Still, on clouded nights, watch Rathlin’s lit pattern censer past. A little industrial structure. One bog-footed cave built for burning. All rabbit shit, trotting-in lost sheep, broken curves open to host brackening rain. A dripped-on Alice, shrunk on Read More
Patron Saint of Disappointing Children Praise to this book, now heavy with scurf, pages moist with the persistence of must, your words still breathing, though only just on the bowed shelves of the house of your birth. Praise to the dynasty of something and nothing, the house of which you one day will be head, Read More
On not straight-jacketing the essay form, creative failures, telling jokes etc.The renowned US essayist, Philip Lopate, interviewed by Paula Lyttle at the “Taking Ideas for a Walk” Essay conference for the University of Dundee Centre for Creative and Critical Cultures, Hospitalfield House, 19-20 June 2018.
Susan Nickalls, a freelance journalist and former student of the Writing Practice and Study programme at the University of Dundee, in conversation with the Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, on the design and building of the V&A Dundee. The interview was filmed at Discovery Point. DURA is grateful for the use of Discovery Point Premises. A Read More
“If we had a vision and a feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow […] and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot, Middlemarch.) The US Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, in her fourth collection of poetry, explores that “other Read More
At this year’s spring exhibition of Danh Voh’s photographs and sculptural installations of found and preserved objects at the Guggenheim in New York, I felt, viscerally, for the first time what had merely been an abstract idea: the rhythm of buildings, the poetry of objects, the stories that reside within, the narrative webs they are Read More