Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to Polish poet, essayist, editor and critic Tadeusz Dąbrowski. They are joined by Kasia Kokowska of Interaktywny Salon Piszących w Szkocji, who came along to help with translating.

Taseusz has been the winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). In 2013,...

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams discusses constructivist poetry and more with award-winning poet, fiction writer, critic and professor Tony Lopez at a rather noisy 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival.  Tony reads from his book Only More So and talks about upcoming projects.

(from Wikipedia): Tony Lopez (born 1950) is an English poet who first began to be published in the 1970s. His writing was at once recognised for its a...

On 15 February 2013, Jennifer Williams and poet/author Tracey S. Rosenberg had a chat about that dreaded and unavoidable demon that every publishing writer must do battle with: rejection.  We hope this podcast will be of interest to all writers who have to deal with inevitable rejection, and especially to young and emerging writers who are starting down the challenging path towards publication. 

Music by James Iremonger. Photo by C...

The multidimensional Kenyan poet, filmmaker and writer Ngwatilo Mawiyoo is the subject of this month’s Nothing But The Poem podcast.

Keguro Macharia, in The New Inquiry, writes that Ngwatilo’s poetry "draws out my own memories [which] speaks to its generative power: its particularity is generous, opening ways for readers to encounter and inhabit it." Hers is a voice that insists on the personal and political being unified.

Who was Eddie Linden (1935-2023)?

A poet, an editor, and a man with an extraordinary range of contacts and friends who ranged from Tom Leonard to Harold Pinter. Linden was a person who achieved much considering his incredibly tough childhood. Born illegitimate, he was passed from pillar to post as a boy in Glasgow. Later, he suffered much anguish when his Roman Catholicism conflicted with his sexuality. In the 1960s, after moving t...

Born in Budapest and brought up in England after coming to the UK as a refugee in 1956, George Szirtes has remained one of the country’s most interesting poets since his first prize-winning collection, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. That wasn’t the last trophy he was to take home; he won the T S Eliot Prize for his 2005 collection Reel.

The SPL caught up with Szirtes at the StAnza poetry festival in March, 2013. In town to ...

Good poetry gets beneath the skin of readers. This episode features a poet who, for a short period, literally got ‘under the skin’.

In the autumn of 2008, poet and essayist Marianne Boruch was awarded a ‘Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline’, permitting her to study something new for a semester. Her choice? Anatomy classes. ‘Cadaver, Speak’, a long poem, was her response to her time dissecting bodies, and in this 2013 podcast,...

In 1972, Liz Lochhead published her debut collection, Memo For Spring, a landmark in Scottish literature. In an extended interview with Colin Waters, the then Scots Makar discusses what the early 1970s poetry scene she emerged into was like, one in which women poets were few and far between. She recalls early meetings with the elder generation – Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch – and with contemporaries such as Tom Leon...

In 2013, Edinburgh-born Ross Sutherland was described as one of the most interesting young poets working in Britain. Inspired by cut-ups and technology, his collection Emergency Window (Penned in the Margins) featured a sequence of classic poems fed through Google Translate many times until they become something else entirely. He wrote a sequence of sonnets about the characters in the video game Street Fighter 2, and yet his work i...

In this episode of Nothing But The Poem podcast, our usual host Samuel Tongue goes in deep on two weel kent poems by Norman MacCaig, one of Scotland's most loved and influential poets.

Norman MacCaig famously, and self-deprecatingly, described writing his poems as "one fag" poems or "two fag" poems. Nothing could be further from the truth for readers, who can spend hours returning again and again to his best work. The two poems fe...

Iain Sinclair is one of the UK’s greatest living writers. Famed for his novels, such as Downriver, and documentary prose, of which London Orbital is perhaps the best known, Sinclair began his career self-publishing his own poetry on his Albion Village Press in the 1970s. 2013 saw the publication of three books – two poetry collections and a longer book on his relationship with the Beats, American Smoke.

Colin Waters travelled to Si...

We have all heard the arguments in favour of Scotland’s best poet or favourite poem, but what about its greatest collection?

In this recording from 2012, the SPL invited two guests – James Robertson, poet, publisher and author of the novels And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Dorothy McMillan, editor of Modern Scottish Women Poets and former Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow...

Anita Govan has been involved in performance poetry for many years, long before it became as widespread as it is today, both as a performer and an organiser of events. Sceptical of the competitive aspects of slams, she still takes part in them and organises them for young people as she recognises their part in giving people a forum in which to share their experiences. In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Govan about her time ...

The Written World was the Scottish Poetry Library’s London 2012 project. To mark the Olympics, we launched a scheme to find a poem for each of the 204 countries taking part, which were then broadcast on BBC Radio. In October 2012, with the project over, we took the chance to look back on The Written World with its project manager Sarah Stewart.

We also talked to Richard Price, whose poem ‘Hedge Sparrows’ was chosen to represent Tea...

Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-2022) was a leading voice in Gaelic poetry for decades, as poet, and as a regular literary commentator in print and on Gaelic radio. To celebrate his seventieth birthday in 2012 he published a new selected poems, Laughing at the Clock / Déanamh Gáire Ris A’ Chloc. MacNeacail came into the SPL in 2013 to talk about his life and career, from his childhood in Uig on the Isle of Skye to his membership of Philip...

Bob Dylan has played many roles in his life: voice of a generation, rock ‘n’ roll Judas, Christian convert, even Victoria’s Secret salesman. The one that concerned the SPL podcast in 2013 was ‘poet’.

Across two biographies – Once Upon A Time and Time Out of Mind (both Mainstream) – Ian Bell (1956-2015) considered Dylan in a more literary context than any other biographer of His Bobness. Over the course of this podcast, we discussed...

Lorna French and Anna Gray lead small groups of (mostly) women to let loose their wild side, to dive in to their unconscious and find their buried treasure. Wild Writers are creatives, public sector workers, teenagers, or any other type of human who is boldly, and often messily, transforming on their hero’s or heroine’s journey.

Ahead of their workshops at the SPL in April and May 2025, Kevin Williamson chats to Lorna and Anna abou...

Best Scottish Poems is the Scottish Poetry Library’s annual online anthology of the 20 Best Scottish Poems, edited each year by a different editor. Bookshops and libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very narrow range of poetry, and Scottish poetry in particular. Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns.

It...