Hugh McMillan – författare

Hugh McMillan’s first collection in Scots, Whit if? poses the questions that you never thought to ask about Scottish history like ‘Whit if Alexander haed Twitter?’, ‘Whit if John Knox haed fawen in luve wi Mary Queen o Scots?’ and ‘Whit if Jacques Brel haed jynt the Corries?’As both poet and long-time student of Scotland’s strange and undervalued history, McMillan is the ideal guide to all the micht-hiv-bins of Scottish history, as well as all that wis. Humour is guaranteed, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be digging up many an educational gem along the way!

Diverted to Split is Hugh McMillan’s new poetry book, his sixth from Luath. As before, his poetry ranges widely in subject matter, from his friends and family to his travels and his politics, and deals with life’s great issues, love and mortality.Andrew Greig has noted that McMillan’s poetry finds the universal in the microscopically personal, a platform, a verge, a wake, a train ride. As ever, humour plays a large part, sometimes bleak, sometimes wholehearted, but you’re never laughing so much you lose sight of the human story, its triumphs, its ultimate failures.This poetry collection will not only be a hit with fans of Hugh McMillan’s work, but any poetry lover that is seeking for warmth and the wit of humans during these turbulent times.

Hugh McMillan’s first collection in Scots, Whit if? poses the questions that you never thought to ask about Scottish history like ‘Whit if Alexander haed Twitter?’, ‘Whit if John Knox haed fawen in luve wi Mary Queen o Scots?’ and ‘Whit if Jacques Brel haed jynt the Corries?’As both poet and long-time student of Scotland’s strange and undervalued history, McMillan is the ideal guide to all the micht-hiv-bins of Scottish history, as well as all that wis. Humour is guaranteed, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be digging up many an educational gem along the way!

Hugh McMillan is a poet and one of Scotland’s best and most unique contemporary voices. Rarely operating in the mainstream, he has yet built up a reputation for powerful, accessible and moving work, often using humour as a tool. He has been writing poetry for 30 years and this book represents the first sizeable selection of that work, along with a large number of new poems.

Heliopolis is Hugh McMillan’s sixth collection of poetry. The poems range from his kitchen table to Greece, St Petersburg and Mars. He finds the universal in the purely local and the local in the universal. Where people live, breath, hope and suffer that’s where his poetry is, as legacy, dream and testament.

The Conversation of Sheep is a book by, for, and about sheep. For those who live in the country sheep are strange punctuation marks in life, chewing insouciantly in the background while folk are born, work, live and die below the great and sundering sky. Some of these poems feature sheep as bucolic extras in the film of life, others delve deep into the secret nature and personalities of sheep themselves. Hugh McMillan is an award winning poet and Michael Robertson, whose photographs also populate this book, is a shepherd who lives in the same village.

McMillan's Galloway, a witty and irreverent look at contemporary Dumfries and Galloway, provides a suitably individualistic snapshot of a place which operated for so long as an independent entity completely separate from its neighbours, Scotland and England. McMillan takes us on a rollicking tour from the Mull of Galloway to Langholm, through land once shrouded in myth and populated by warriors, emigrants, fairies and liars, rooting out the truth and the fiction and frequently confusing them.