Stewart Conn – författare

'Not as if I always lived here, mind you…I started off in Govan. Never dreamt in those days I’d end up this side of the river. Real step up in the world that was…I’m grateful for it. Despite everything, I’m grateful for it'Glasgow, the 1970s. Martha and Amie are old neighbours, trapped in their decaying tenement and cut off from family and friends. With the present closing in and the future uncertain, Martha and Amie’s real companions are the past and their memories of ordinary lives peopled by extraordinary characters and their struggles and triumphs.I Didn’t Always Live Here is a compassionate and heart-rending journey into the forgotten lives of the dispossessed and elderly, as well as an uplifting journey into the human spirit’s capacity to cope with social exclusion and financial hardship. One of multi-award-winning playwright and poet Stewart Conn’s earliest works, I Didn’t Always Live Here now receives its first production since its world premiere at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre in 1967.

An island can be a source of escape or return, of solace or threat. In this anthology rich depictions of island flora and fauna sit alongside sightings of croft dwellers and ferry-lowpers. Expressions of affection and accounts of imprisonment and bereavement sit cheek-by-jowl with evocations of drowned sailors, corporeal and ghostly. Praise poems alternate with diary entries and holiday postcards. Others cover stretches of water: Corrievreckan, say, or the Minch. And while there is a recurring sense of island heritage, and of belonging, the poet's feet need not be actively on island soil or on the deck of a fishing-boat.In Other Worlds editor Stewart Conn has sought poems to set readers' hearts racing through a sharpening of memory or in opening new vistas and evoking new worlds and states of mind from Orkney and Shetland to the Hebrides, to Mull and Iona, Arran and Ailsa Craig; from St Kilda and Luing to Inchcape, the Torren rocks and the Isle of May.

The Touch of Time is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of one of Scotland's leading poets drawing on ten previous books published over five decades. The new work here pursues the themes of his earlier Bloodaxe collections Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005) and The Breakfast Room (2010). With what Professor Carla Stassi sees as 'his thoughtful attention to small details, his redeeming gaze, his formal control of impeccably constructed verses, and his deep and warm humanity', he movingly explores everyday events and revelations and how - like our lives and those of our loved ones - they are transformed by time.

100 Favourite Scottish Poems brings together the best and best-loved of Scottish poetry. From anonymous medieval ballads to the renowned work of Sir Walter Scott and Edwin Morgan, the cream of the nation's poetry - from the Borders to Shetland - is represented in this carefully chosen anthology. 100 Favourite Scottish Poems includes the Top 20 of the nation's favourite poetic pieces, chosen by BBC Scotland listeners in a recent web poll. Scotland's most famous poets are represented - Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Muriel Spark, Iain Crichton Smith, Liz Lochhead, plus many more.

This work features a vibrant selection of the best Scottish love poems, with each poet limited to one poem excepting Burns himself, that spans centuries and feelings of affection and desire. These poems explore many different kinds of love: sexual, passionate, romantic, parental. In 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems traditional Scottish verse mixes with great literature as Bonny Barbara Allan and Jock o' Hazeldean rub shoulders with Byron and Hogg. Modern Scottish writing from some of the most inspiring poets of our time, MacCaig, MacDiarmid, Morgan and Carol Ann Duffy, contrasts with Gaelic poetry by Sorley MacLean, Derick Thomson and Meg Bateman. Poems of first love, yearning for love, love in absence and epernal love are not grouped thematically, as in so many other anthologies, but seamlessly so that contrasting poems can strike sparks off one another, across the page - often with wit and jollity - to demonstrate that we experience love in individual and inspiring ways.