There She Goes

Esa Aldegheri is a multilingual writer, scholar and educator. Her book Free to Go (John Murray 2022) moves beyond a simple travel narrative to explore different aspects of freedom and borders, both geopolitical and personal. Esa’s other non-fiction has been published by Granta, MAP Magazine, Gutter Press, the Dangerous Women Project and others. Esa works as a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, studying and supporting refugee integration across Scotland.Alice Tarbuck is an award-winning poet and writer. Her debut non-fiction book, A Spell in the Wild: a year (and six centuries) of Magic, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. With Claire Askew, she is the co-editor of The Modern Craft, published by Watkins. She is a previous winner of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award for poetry, and recipient of their award for programming. She has taught Creative Writing at the Universities of Dundee and York, and is a Lead Reader for Open Book. Alice is currently Writer in Residence on the AHRC funded Print Matters project at the University of York.Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow. A poet and regular columnist in The National, her first solo anthology, Through Wood, was published in 2008, and her collection with Tawona Sitholé, The Warriors Who Do Not Fight, in 2018 (both with Wild Goose). In 2024, she published Keep Telling of Gaza with Khawla Badwan (Sídhe Press). She has two more poetry anthologies forthcoming with Wild Goose in 2025.Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. She graduated with a first from Glasgow School of Art and has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her arts-based PhD, from UHI/ the University of Aberdeen, is about the forests of Abernethy and Morayshire. Her artwork is often about notions of home, movement and migration, landscapes and how places come to be made. She lives and works in Glasgow and in Strathspey. A Scots Dictionary of Nature is her first book. Anna Fleming is a writer from mid-Wales and Scotland. An active traveller and climber, she collects stories of people, mountains and nature from around the world. Her memoir, Time on Rock (Canongate 2022) was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and Boardman-Tasker Award. Her PhD with the University of Leeds examined Wordsworth’s creativity and Cumbrian communities. When at home, she can be found in Edinburgh.Dr Claire Askew's books include the creative writing guide Novelista (John Murray, 2020), the multi-award-winning novel All The Hidden Truths (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018) and the poetry collections This changes things (2016) and How To Burn A Woman (2021), both from Bloodaxe Books. Claire has worked as a Scottish Book Trust Reading Champion, a Jessie Kesson Fellow, and as the University of Edinburgh’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Cumbria.Jemma Neville is an author, journalist and explorer living in rural East Lothian. Her travel writing has been published in the Guardian, The National Trust for Scotland magazine and Preferred Travel magazine. Jemma’s nonfiction book, Constitution Street, is the story of a daily walk along one street in Edinburgh and the interconnecting lives of the people she met. She won The Creative Edinburgh Award, has twice been highly commended in The Anne Brown Essay Prize and was a finalist in the Guardian‘s International Development Journalism Award.Kerri Ní Dochartaigh is a mother, writer, holder and grower. She has written for the Guardian, BBC, RTE, Irish Times and others. She mentors and teaches worldwide. Her work currently explores ideas of ‘one-amotherness’, interconnectedness and ecologies of care. Her first book, Thin Places, for which she won the 2022 Butler Literary Award and was highly commended in the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, was published by Canongate in spring 2021. Cacophony of Bone was published by Canongate in May 2023 and was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing in the same year. She lives in the west of Ireland with her family.Lee Craigie was Scotland’s Active Nation Commissioner and founder of female-led not-for-profit The Adventure Syndicate. A trained outdoor instructor and child therapist, Lee then became the British Mountain Bike Champion in 2013 and represented Scotland at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. She has told stories of inspiring adventure through her award-winning film Divided and in her latest book, which won the Vicki Orvice Women’s prize for sports writing, Other Ways to Win. She has contributed to other literary anthologies including Imagine a World and Waymaking. Lee presented the popular BBC Scotland radio series Lifecycle and has delivered a TedX talk to wide acclaim. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and lives in the Highlands of Scotland.Leena Rustom Nammari is a Palestinian artist living in Scotland. She has exhibited widely within Scotland, Europe, China, Australia and Palestine, as part of group and solo exhibitions. She has worked as a printmaking technician, studio manager/co-ordinator, master printer and printmaking educator at Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, and as a freelance art educator with various organisations, including Scottish National Galleries and the RSA. She worked as a nurse for many years prior to her undergraduate in Fine Art Printmaking in 2000, and completed her MFA in 2018. She embarked on a practice-based PhD at DJCAD in 2022.Leonie Charlton lives in Glen Lonan, Argyll, with her family and animals. Publications include her award-winning poetry pamphlet Ten Minutes of Weather Away published by Cinnamon Press in 2021, and her travel memoir Marram, published by Sandstone Press in 2020. Marram was Waterstones’ April 2022 Scottish Book of the Month. Leonie completed her MLitt at Stirling University in 2016, and is currently doing a creative writing practice-based PhD with the University of Highlands and Islands looking at Scotland’s deer debate. She is fascinated by our emotional, cultural, and environmental connection with place and the more-than-human world. www.leoniecharlton.co.ukLinda Cracknell is a writer of narrative nonfiction on the natural world, as well as of fiction and radio scripts. Her first story collection was nominated for Scotland’s National Book Awards and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for environmental writing, and her essay collection Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, about journeys she took on foot in Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and Kenya, was serialized for BBC Radio as a Book of the Week. All of Linda’s writing is inspired first and foremost by place, and she teaches nature and place writing.Margaret Elphinstone has written nine historical novels, including The Gathering Night, Voyageurs and the award-winning Sea Road, that span many lands and centuries with characters inhabiting liminal locations in times of disruption. More recently her poetry and essays, infused with urgency and foreboding, have displayed passionate awareness of the natural world’s fragility. These concerns inspired her novella, Lost People. Shortlisted for the 2024 Saltire award, it offers hope and redemption in a time of war and desolation. She has worked as an organic gardener and an academic and is Emerita Professor of writing at Strathclyde University. She lives in Galloway.Marjorie Lotfi is the author of The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She co-authored The World May Be the Same (Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2023), a collection of poetry about the experiences of people of colour living in Scotland, with the writer Hannah Lavery. Her poetry has won awards and been published widely, most recently on London’s Poems on the Underground. She is currently working on a memoir about her childhood in revolutionary Iran and Ohio.Roseanne Watt is a writer, filmmaker and musician from Shetland. Her dual-language debut collection, Moder Dy, was published by Polygon in May 2019, after receiving the prestigious Edwin Morgan Poetry Award for Scottish poets under thirty. Moder Dy subsequently received both an Eric Gregory and Somerset Maugham Award in 2020, and was named joint-winner of the Highland Book Prize 2019. In 2019, Roseanne completed a funded doctorate from the University of Stirling in the disciplines of creative writing and filmmaking. She is currently poetry editor for the online literary journal The Island Review.Roxani Krystalli is an academic at the University of St Andrews, where her research and teaching focus on feminist peace and conflict studies, as well as on the politics of nature and place. A key question animating Roxani’s writing and work is how people imagine and enact worlds in the wake of loss. Her first book, Good Victims, was published in 2024. Roxani is currently co-leading a research project on the politics of love and care. She is from Greece and lives in Scotland.Sarah Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and traveller. A PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Glasgow resulted in her debut The Raven’s Nest (Atlantic Books, 2022), an ecological memoir set in Iceland, which was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize and shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. She has taught creative writing for Arvon Foundation and various universities. Shaped by an upbringing in Kenya and a half decade in Iceland, she can currently be found tramping the intertidal zone of south-west Scotland. ‘Stay At Home’ is an extract from a book in progress.Janette Ayachi is a Scottish-Algerian poet. She is a regular on BBC arts programmes & collaborates with artists & performs at festivals internationally. Her first poetry book Hand Over Mouth Music (Pavilion, Liverpool University Press) won the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Literary Award 2019 & her poetry, prose & essays have been published & translated into a broad range of newspapers, magazines & anthologies. Her book QuickFire, Slow Burning (Pavilion, LUP) was Longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2024. She is now writing her travel memoir Lonerlust & her debut fiction novel Of Sweet Figs and Forget-Me-Nots.