Thursday 28 May 2009
6.30pm – 8pm

Reviews by Douglas W. Gray and Judy Taylor

Sheila Templeton was born in Aberdeen, spent an itinerant childhood ranging from Rannoch Moor to Dar-es-Salaam. Her work draws on that rich Buchan landscape and now the changing light of the Ayrshire coastline.

Poems in New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and The Herald. Won the Scottish Association of Writers Poetry Trophy 2002 and major awards in the Killie Writing Competition. In 2007 she won third prize in the James McCash Scots Language Poetry Competition. Her poem Hairst Meen was selected by Edwin Morgan from over 260 entries to the competition. In 2007 Sheila won the McLellan Trophy.

Slow Road Home is Sheila's first collection.

Rowena Love is based in the West of Scotland.

Published both in the UK and abroad: The Herald, The Scots Magazine, Poetry Scotland, Psychopoetica, The Wild East (Hong Kong), the BBC, and many other magazines.

Member of the Society of Authors. Rowena has won and been runner-up in a number of local and national competitions: Ottakar's and Faber annual competition, the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition.

Rowena's collections include The Chameleon of Happiness and Comin Oot in the Wash.

Michael Malone has spent all of his life in Ayrshire, delivering milk (he was thirteen; bless), selling shoes and suits (doing a Del-boy), working in a call centre (hated this), selling books (loved this), bank teller, financial advisor, life coach and back to banking.

Wrote his first book aged eleven and forcing his pals to read it. Writing poetry sustained him through his teenage years, but thankfully, he says, they all got lost.

Life got in the way (too few women and too much drink) until a conversation at work reminded him of his childhood dream — to write. Since then he has been widely published in literary magazines and has had some poems included in the novels of Margaret Thomson Davis.

Promoted by

Dead Good Poets
Wordfringe

Supported by

Books and Beans
Scottish Book Trust