Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s pre-eminence as a poet is too well known to need any elucidation of course, but perhaps it is worth noting here that his prowess as a translator was also already evident in his Beowulf. Heaney undertook his verse translation of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid to honour the memory of Read More
Tom Hubbard was the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and is the author, editor or co-editor of over thirty academic and literary works, including several novels and poetry collections. Slavonic Dances, the name given to a series of orchestral pieces by Dvorak, is a happy title for this sequence of novellas whose characters Read More
Alexander McCall Smith is a prolific author of fiction and academic texts, and he is best known as the writer of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. His latest release, A Distant View of Everything, is the eleventh in a series of novels known as the “Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries”. Like the Jessica Fletcher character Read More
In his first full collection of poems and flash fiction, Thomas McColl demonstrates the truth of Seamus Heaney’s remark that poets are distinguished by their ability to “notice things.” These fifty-six pieces are notable for their acute observation and unconventional treatment of a variety of topics. In the poem “I”, a rule of grammar, arguably, Read More
