Loretta Mulholland

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.

Cut Flowers

As Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics in Sheffield Hallum University, Harriet Tarlo’s poetry centres on linguistic, natural and political landscapes. Divided into four seasons, with twelve poems per section, Cut Flowers blends into and builds upon itself organically. The collection consists of poems of hybrid structures, which can be read horizontally or vertically, allowing for different interpretations and conceptual understandings, often indicating the juxtaposition between beautiful living things and the severed, separated, dying and the dead.

Anna

When I lived in London my dad and I had a game about being happy. We called it the Happy Game … I nearly stopped playing the game for a while … but then I thought, well, happiness really doesn’t count for much if it only depends on good things happening to us, does it? Read More

WRITING PRACTICE AND STUDY 2019 SHOWCASE: “Moments in Thin Places” BY Loretta Mulholland

Loretta Mulholland was born in Glasgow and studied for an MA (Hons) in Modern History and Economic History at Glasgow University. She worked as an Industrial Archaeologist and Research Assistant to Professor John Hume at Strathclyde University and co-wrote an academic publication on the history of the Scottish Brick and Tile Industry, entitled, Scottish Brickmarks. She Read More

Washington Black

The story of George Washington Black is told in the first person by Esi Edugyan’s protagonist of the same name in her Man Booker shortlisted novel. Starting as an eleven-year-old field slave in Faith Plantation in Barbados in 1830, the conditions of his slave life in the harsh setting of the sugar plantation is perhaps Read More

ELMET (SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017)

“And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched.” Elmet is a contemporary novel, set in rural Yorkshire, yet it seems to take us to a different time and a different world. The reference to Ted Hughes’ poetry collection (Remains of Elmet) in the title of Read More