Current line-up for this year's Bookfest (2012):

Ross Wilson from Kelty is a writer and poet and has been getting rave reviews for his first collection The Heavy Bag. His second book of poems will be out  early next year. As well as holding down a full time job, he has written several novels and  was also one of the writers on the film The Happy Lands which was given an enthusiastic reception in Fife and will be shown on television later this year.

 

 

Fiona Watson is a freelance writer and historian. She also teaches a final year course on the wars of independence at the University of Dundee, where she is an honorary research fellow, and contributes to Radio 4's Making History programme. She is currently on the Academic Advisory Panel helping with the revamping of the National Trust's Bannockburn site for the 2014 anniversary , is working on a book about the experiences of a number of individuals, Scots and English, during the wars of independence, and a short book on Robert Bruce for a series on History Greats.

Tom Hubbard – academic, poet, playwright, magazine editor, etc
In 2011-12 Tom Hubbard was, successively, Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of Connecticut and Professeur invité at the Stendhal University, Grenoble. In the spring of 2012 he was a Writer-in-Residence at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland, and has recently been a Visiting Scholar of the Elphinstone Institute of Aberdeen University. He's also Honorary Visiting Fellow, Institute of Governance, Edinburgh University, working on a Scotland and Europe project. He's outgoing editor of The Pathhead Review, an online publication concerned with art, science, and the meaning of Fife.

Elizabeth Elliott – Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Edinburgh University
Elizabeth Elliott is a former postdoctoral fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities who has published on medieval and renaissance literature. In 2009 she worked on the Edinburgh International Festival production by David Levin of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. She is currently working on the emergence of conceptions of cultural identity and a national literature tradition within Scottish literary culture through the Bannatyne Manuscript and its reception history. She is an associate editor of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance.

William Hershaw – poet, musician and songwriter
William Hershaw is Principal Teacher of English at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. His poetry collections in Scots and English include  Fower Brigs Tae A Kinrik, The Cowdenbeath Man, 50 Fife Sonnets and most recently Happyland. In 2005 he won the Callum MacDonald /NLS Memorial Award and in 2011 he was awarded the McCash Prize for Scots Poetry by Glasgow University. In 2007 he collaborated with sculptor David Annand, writing the poem God The Miner which is inscribed on the statue The Prop in the town centre as part of the Lochgelly Regeneration Project. He is co-editor of the cultural/literary magazine, Fras. His latest work, funded by Fife Council, is Cageload of Men, a CD of the poems of Joe Corrie set to music.

David Greig – playwright and theatre director
David Greig is one of Scotland’s most prolific contemporary playwrights. Since his first play was produced by Suspect Culture Theatre Company (which he co-founded with Graham Eatough and Nick Powell in Glasgow) he has been commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is currently dramaturge at the National Theatre of Scotland. His version of Euripides’ The Bacchae opened the Edinburgh International Festival in 2007. In 2010 his Dunsinane was premiered at the Hampstead Theatre by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his Letter of Last Resort was presented by the Traverse Theatre at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Emma Lloyd studied violin at the Royal Northern College of Music with Eyal Kless, adopting the viola as a second study in her final year, receiving lessons from Michael Gurevich. Following this, she completed a masters in musicology at the University of Edinburgh, where she is now working towards a PhD in contemporary performance practice, supervised by Peter Nelson. During this time she has had lessons with Ruth Crouch and coaching from Mieko Kanno, as well as baroque violin lessons with Ruth Slater. Emma is a member of the Eris Ensemble with whom she enjoys performing a variety of music from lesser-known Scottish baroque music on period instruments, to quartet music by up-and-coming contemporary composers

Andrew Woolley – Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Edinburgh University
Andrew Woolley’s research focuses on music in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. He recently completed a research project on a flute concerto by Antonio Vivaldi ('Il Gran Mogol'), the only known source of which he located among the papers of the Marquesses of Lothian in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh, in 2010. His Fellowship will allow him to research a project on archival records of musical life in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Andrew is also an active performer as a keyboard player and singer, and is editor of the performance practice journal Early Music Performer.

Shirley McKay was born in Tynemouth but now lives with her family in Fife. At the age of fifteen she won the Young Observer playwriting competition, her play being performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. She went on to study English and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews before attending Durham University for postgraduate study in Romantic and seventeenth century prose. She was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. Shirley works as a freelance proofreader.

 

Moira McPartlin is a Scot with Irish roots. Although born in the Scottish Borders, she was brought up in a Fife mining village. She has been writing short stories, articles and poetry for a number of years and has had work published in Northwords Now, Crannog, Countryside Tales, Brittle Star, Giggle, The Scottish Mountaineer and a number of anthologies. She has also regularly contributed book reviews and articles to www.laurahird.com. Moira is one of the organizers for Weegie Wednesday, a monthly book industry networking event held in Glasgow and sits on the editorial board of New Voices Press, the publishing arm of the Federation of Writers’ Scotland.
Her debut novel The Incomers was published by Fledgling Press in April 2012.

Alan Bissett  was born in 1975 in Falkirk, studied English at Stirling University, worked briefly as an English teacher, before his debut novel, Boyracers, was published in 2001 by Polygon.  He lectured in Creative Writing at Leeds University before moving to Glasgow, to take up a teaching position on Glasgow University’s Creative Writing MLitt. He left Glasgow University in December 2007, and has been working as a full time writer ever since. Alan was the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Writer of the Year  in 2011and has performed at prestigious international festivals in New York, Toronto, the Hague, Melbourne, Bejing, Zagreb and Kikinda (Serbia).

 

Sheila Kinninmonth

Born and brought up in Fife and with a background in early years education, Sheila has been storytelling for over 7 years - telling Scottish folk, fairy and Traveller tales as well as traditional tales from all over the world.

She uses puppets, props and sound-makers, and involves her audience in a sense of occasion, bringing people of all ages and backgrounds together.

Bronwen Winter Phoenix is a 26-year-old three-time published, award-nominated fiction author and freelance journalist currently residing in the UK. A highly-devoted supporter of the Root Vegetable Rights Campaign (1976 – present), she is therefore one of those evil meat-eater types. Of course, she’s not adverse to a good parsnip or two, as long as they’ve been treated right. Her third novel, ‘Grassmarket Blood’ was published by Cauliay Publishing in August 2011, and was nominated for a Galaxy Book Award.

She is also currently editing her fourth novel, a weird/comedy/sci-fi/thriller, and features a main character called Meredith.

Her publisher at Cauliay Publishing once stated that if there was an X-Factor for writers, she would be the winner. Little does he know that if there was an X-Factor for writers, she would probably kill herself.
 

 

Previous Bookfest guests:
 

  Andrew Greig,is attracted to climbing and writing because both activities give him a sense of being fully alive.. His six books of poetry range from short love lyrics to the epic Men on Ice. His novel, Electric Brae (1992) was shortlisted for the Boardman-Tasker Prize for mountain writing; The Return of John Macnab (1996) was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists' Award; other books include When They Lay Bare, and That Summer .

Aline Templeton is fascinated by psychology – what makes people do what they do, what the secret stories are that lie beneath the surface.  She has written at least 12 novels and her best selling Marjorie Fleming books feature a Detective Inspector who is also a farmer’s wife with children and a home to cope with.

 

 Jim Crumley is a nature writer and broadcaster, dealing mostly with the landscape and wildlife of Scotland. He is renowned for his style: passionate, inspiring and sensitive. His latest books include The Last  Wolf and the fascinating story of The Winter Whale.

                      

 

  

Sue Peebles was born in Scotland in 1955, but spent some of her childhood in Detroit. Since graduating in Psychology she has worked as a researcher, social worker and university teacher. 'The Death of Lomond Friel' is her first novel. Winner of the Scottish First Book Award and Saltire First Book Award, and short-listed for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year, 'The Death of Lomond Friel' was listed in The Times Best Debut Novels 2010 as an 'unusual, loveable debut ... superbly written'.

                                                                                                          

  

 

 Jonathan Falla is a writer, playwright, film maker and medic, with a string of best sellers to his credit. Appointed  Teaching Director of the St Andrews Creative Writing Summer School, his latest work, The Craft of Fiction: How to be a novelist, is a guide to the major techniques of fiction writing, based on his experience teaching for the Open University, St Andrews and the Arvon Foundation.

 

 

 

   

 

                     

     

                        

Kevin Cadwallender lives in Edinburgh. He was shortlisted for a Sony Award for his BBC Radio 4 programme Voyages. His selected poems Dances with Vowels was published February 2009; he runs Voxbox, a poetry venue in Edinburgh  and is Scottish Editor for Red Squirrel Press and co-editor of Vair Books include Baz Poems, Public, Baz Uber Alles , and Colouring in Guernica .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eliza Langland is a professional actor and writer with a wealth of  experience in BBC radio, features and dramas, short stories, non-fiction, comedy monologues and song.

 

                                                       

   

 Farooqi Muskwati had his first screenplay, a modern twist on the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ story, turned into a film by Channel Fife TV in 2010 and will talk about his unique journey into the world of movie making.

 

 

 

 

 

 Kerry Black - The Puppet Wife