Fellowship winners use £2,000 award to explore wellbeing, history and classic tale
THE Scottish Book Trust has announced the second Ignite Fellowship winners.
The three Fellows will receive a £2,000 bursary and support for their individual creative projects for a year.
Artist and writer Anoushka Havinden and poet Colin Mcguire were selected by a panel including representatives from Scottish Book Trust and a professional writer.
Actor and writer Catriona Lexy Campbell was selected as the Gaelic Ignite Fellowship awardee, funded by the Gaelic Books Council.
Colin Mcguire, an awardwinning poet and writer from Glasgow, now based in Edinburgh, published his collection of poetry Enhanced Fool Disclosure in 2018.
His long-form spoken-word piece The Wake-up Call has been performed at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Lyceum Theatre, Hidden Door Festival and at the Edinburgh Fringe. His poem The Glasgae Boys won the Out-spoken Prize for Poetry and the Film Poetry Award in 2018.
For his Ignite Fellowship project, Mr Mcguire will draw on his work as a poet and a mindfulness teacher to explore wellbeing and mindfulness to record the process of loss and grief after the death of his brother.
Writer and visual artist Ms Havinden’s poems have won the James Kirkup Prize, the William Souter Prize and the Nairn Book & Arts Festival Writing Prize.
She plans to use the Ignite Fellowship to work on a poetry collection exploring the watery history, geography and life of the west of Scotland.
Ms Campbell has worked as a theatre artist, actor and writer, primarily in her native Gaelic. She has published numerous works, including two novels for adults, two novels for Gaelic learners, a novel and book of short stories for children, a trilogy of novels for young adults and three plays. Her plays have toured widely, and she has produced radio plays and short films that have been broadcast on BBC Alba.
During her Ignite Fellowship, Ms Campbell will be working on a screen adaptation of her father, Tormod Caimbeul’s debut novel, Deireadh an Fhoghair (The End Of Autumn). Published in 1979, the book, widely regarded as a classic in Gaelic literature, tells the story of the last inhabitants of a community on a Hebridean island as they prepare to face the winter.