Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power

Banner-maker, community artist and textile curator, Clare Hunter won the Saltire First Book Award for her debut work, Threads of Life (2019), which became Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Month and a Radio 4 Book of the Week. Embroidering Her Truth continues this historical thread, weaving readers through episodes in Mary Stuart’s life, with an intricate examination of embroideries, tapestries, and textiles, and the subliminal messages these held.

Wanting: Essay Fragments (Winner of the 2022 PNR prize for Creative Essaying at the University of Dundee)

Burden Goldilocks produces prophesied curls, Snow White becomes a pearly corpse, Thumbelina never grows beyond her moniker. “What’s my name?” The Queen speaks the legendary word and Rumpelstiltskin, crooked imp, boils. Hops on stilt-thin legs, hide splitting. Repel-stilt-skin. I gobble fairy-tales like chocolates, plump with self-appointed expertise. Evil girls pretend to be princesses, masquerade as Read More

It Ain’t Over Till… by Andrew Forbes

MLITT, WRITING PRACTICE AND STUDY 2019-21 SHOWCASE A small crowd consisting mostly of students sit around the wooden table. Some of them have grown rowdier with each swall sank and there have been a fair few swalls sank by now. I had wanted some time alone before having to join them. I’ve been standing by Read More

For Now: An Interview with Meaghan Delahunt

Meaghan Delahunt, a small sunburst of a person, meets me on a cold mid-March morning in Edinburgh with a smile and a joke about elbow-bumping, softly deflecting the viral threat of a handshake or hug as only an avid reader of that day’s online news would know to do. On the train and in the Read More

Caught in between: A Creative Folio by Mareth Burns

Coming/Going The girl could step off the train, go round by the post office and the pubs, climb the hill and find herself next to the road between two grassy verges. And if she wanted to, she could peel away the layers; from daffodils, to snow, to burnt leaves and watch the video tape rewind. Read More

Unpacking by Jamie Cameron

I have a box of memories. It’s a square brown box – one of those used for moving to a new house, ‘memories’ scrawled on one side in black ink. For years it moved with me and my partner from flat to flat, accumulating a little more in weight each year as we collected little Read More

These Windows

  I am thrilled to present an online collection of writing and art as the first instalment of These Windows, a collaborative publishing project between the University of Dundee and the V&A Dundee. The online gallery, gathered here on DURA, pairs with a forthcoming printed publication to showcase the creative dexterity of DJCAD Illustration BDes Read More

Knitted Glass

From These Windows: Online Collection – a selection of writing and art inspired by the collections of the V&A Museums.  She would usually phone me on her break and tell me to wait outside her boyfriend’s flat after five o’clock. We’ll get food, she would say, and watch movies. We were best friends. One time, Read More

Conditions At Home

From These Windows: Online Collection – a selection of writing and art inspired by the collections of the V&A Museums.  Legend goes Ma only knew Pa was drinking at work when one day he came home sober. Hypocrite. She could put it back too. Red wine and coke. That’s one thing I don’t like to Read More