My friends at the Goethe-Institut asked me to write a piece about Edinburgh Konditormeister Falko Burkert for their Meet the Germans project. You can read the result here. Although their tuition has enabled me to extricate myself from many scrapes in Germany, I’m ashamed to say that in this case the interview was conducted auf Englisch.
Nice news! Sublimation, the opera I wrote with composer Nick Fells for Scottish Opera, will have five special guest performances as part of Cape Town Opera’s Five:20 Operas Made in South Africa series. It’ll be directed by Matthew Richardson, as before, and will feature Lee Bisset and Kally Llord-Jones from the original cast.
Performance dates are 21, 23, 24, 26, 27 November 2010 in the Baxter Theatre, Rondebosch.
Recently I reviewed Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong for the Sunday Herald. You can find out what I thought of it here.
You can hear me on the Herald Scotland’s CultureCast talking to literary editor and author Rosemary Goring about my influences and the wider topic of sex in Scottish Literature. Listen here or download free from iTunes.
Rosemary and I were chatting in advance of one of the forthcoming Unbound nights at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. McSex: A Night in the Gutter is at 9pm on Sunday 15th August in the Speigeltent, and I’ll be reading alongside Michel Faber, Ewan Morrison, Helen Sedgwick, Anneliese Mackintosh, Allan Radcliffe and others tbc. The evening is organised by Gutter magazine and you can find full details
There’s also an extract from my novel in issue 3 of Gutter.
Louise and I are working hard on our first collaboration, a play called Panic Patterns. It’s a Glasgay! commission and will be on at the Citizens from 19th to 30th October 2010.
The blurb says:
‘Ornithologists Jacq and Fay are on a remote island in the far north of Scotland investigating sudden changes in bird migration patterns. Fay believes these changes signify forthcoming disaster. Jacq thinks the isolation is making her younger lover paranoid. But they were meant to leave the island three days ago, their boat home still hasn’t arrived and their radio has been dead for a week. When the decommissioned lighthouse across the bay shines back into life, the two women are forced to make a crucial decision.
Sometimes tender, sometimes disorientating, Panic Patterns draws on contemporary fears to create an edgy, suspenseful drama for a new decade.’
I’ll be taking part in the Scottish PEN readings this Sunday, 13th June, as part of the Leith Festival. The day is billed as ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: 14 hour literary mash up’, but our events are as follows:
3pm Scottish PEN WRITERS IN EXILE
We celebrate a year of our on-line magazine, New Writing. Scottish PEN writers Bashabi Fraser, Elspeth Brown and Sue Reid Sexton will be accompanying refugee writers, Kusay Hussein and Abdul Muqadus, for short readings of their work in the magazine and elsewhere and discussion of the experience of writers in exile.
4pm Scottish PEN DEPARTURES and ARRIVALS
Themed discussion and readings from leading Scottish authors: Louise Welsh (The Cutting Room, Naming the Bones); Zoe Strachan (Negative Space, Spin Cycle); and Ron Butlin (The Sound of My Voice, Belonging) to promote the release of the latest Scottish PEN CD, Departures and Arrivals.
The venue is the Bond 09 Cocktail Bar, 84 Commercial Street, Leith. Admission is free but donations to Scottish PEN would be very gratefully received.
I may not be supposed to post this image; if not, many apologies and if you let me know I’ll remove it immediately! But I really wanted to share a production photo from Sublimation, the Five:15 opera Nick Fells and I collaborated on for Scottish Opera:
The photographer is Tommy Ga-Ken Wan, and the photo comes from his flickr page. The singers are both incredible sopranos as well as very good actors, Miranda Sinani (l) and Lee Bisset (r).
I’ll be tutoring on a special Arvon course at Moniack Mhor in August, alongside the lovely Kevin MacNeil:
‘There comes a time when you have to stop talking, sit down and write. Each participant will receive two hours individual tutoring during the week, with the rest of the time free for writing. All students will have their own room. You are encouraged to submit the work you want to develop by July 5 – up to 3,000 words.’
Wokring closely, one to one, on people’s novels is probably my favourite kind of teaching, so I’m quite excited about this one. The ‘One to one novel writing residency’ runs from 16th - 21st August; for more details, click here. As usual with Arvon, places are limited and financial assistance may be available.
You can read my short story ‘In the House by the Sea’ in the Glasgow Voices feature which appears in Issue 10 of the International Literary Quarterly. There’s work there by lots of very good Glasgow-based writers so it’s well worth exploring.
The bilingual publication from the interdisciplinary project I worked on with Louise Welsh, Laura Murray and David Sherry, ‘I throw my prayers into the sky’, is now available from Villa Concordia Press. It first appeared as an exhibition with objects from Laura, drawings and a performance from David, and text from Louise and I (Villa Concordia , Bamberg, 18th November – 18th December 2008). The project was supported by the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, in particular Bernd Goldmann (who also edited the book) and Stephanie Weiß, and by the British Council Germany, to whom we’re very grateful.
