Abstracts

Below you will find the abstracts for the Association for Scottish Literature/Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Conference 2026. Click on each paper title for further information.

Anne Ciecko

Intermedial Polyphony and the 20th Century Makar: Margaret Tait and the Cross-currents of Poetic Hybridity

Following Margaret Tait’s death at the end of the 20th century, she has increasingly been recognized as an innovative polymath, a pioneer in the genre of the poetry film, where words (seen, spoken, sung), filmed and hand-drawn animated images, music, and ambient sounds are variously interwoven, mutually illuminated, and transformed. In this presentation grounded in archival research at multiple archival sites throughout Scotland including the collections at the Orkney Library & Archive, the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, and elsewhere, I will examine the ways these elements converge in her explorations of Scottish identity—including languages and dialects.
My presentation will include consideration of her poetry, her film work (30+ shorts and her sole feature film), letters, interviews, and related documents. Aiming for meticulous dialogism, I will outline the ways scholars and critics have addressed what I’m calling the “intermedial polyphony” of Margaret Tait’s work. My presentation will conclude with an original self-made short poetry film created in Scotland and inspired by Tait’s work.

Dr Hilary Clydesdale & Dr Ainsley McIntosh

A Light in the Dark: Lighthouses, Language, and the Afterlives of Walter Scott’s Lighthouse Yacht Journal (1814)

This paper arises from A Light in the Dark, an ongoing project examining Walter Scott’s Lighthouse Yacht Journal (1814) and its editorial, cultural, and material afterlives. While Scott’s account of his voyage with the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses is rooted in the early nineteenth century, this paper considers how the Journal continued to inform later representations of Skye and the Western Isles, particularly across the twentieth century.

Using Dunvegan, Loch Follart, and the Minch as case studies, we explore how Scott’s Anglophone descriptions of predominantly Gaelic-speaking maritime communities were revisited, reframed, and selectively inherited in later travel writing, visual art, and heritage contexts. Lighthouses are approached as cultural contact zones, where state infrastructure, literary authority, and local knowledge intersect, and where processes of linguistic mediation become especially visible.

By placing Scott’s Journal in dialogue with later responses rather than treating it as an isolated historical artefact, the paper highlights enduring cross-currents between Gaelic, Scots, and English, and reflects on the challenges of representing local industries, traditions, folklore, and dialect from an external perspective. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions of voice, mediation, and multilingual encounters in Scottish writing.

John Corbett

Shifting Perspectives: Scots and English in Nan Shepherd’s Novels

Nan Shepherd’s three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933) established her place among Scottish modernist writers. This chapter paper addresses Shepherd’s narrative prose style in these three novels. It examines the ways in which Shepherd draws on and extends the modes of representing the Scots and English languages in Scottish fiction. Its argument is that Shepherd builds on the conventions of representing Scots in fiction that developed during the 19th and early 20th century, but also destabilises the reader position by regularly introducing Scots into her narrative beyond the dialogue.
Overall, Shepherd’s fiction is characterised by the representation of a variety of narrative perspectives, signalled by shifts from Scots to English and back again. This code-switching prompts the reader continually to revise their attitude towards the events and values being presented in her novels. The innovative use of her literary and linguistics resources marks Shepherd out as a novelist who straddles tradition and modernism.

Emma Dymock

Dàin do Eimhir and Auntran Blads: The Impact of Sorley MacLean and Douglas Young in 1943

Sorley MacLean’s Dàin do Eimhir and Douglas Young’s Auntran Blads: An Outwale o Verses were both published in 1943. While this could be viewed as a landmark year for poetry within the Gaelic and Scots traditions, the reality is that the connections, crosscurrents and inspiration between MacLean and Young had been unfolding for some time before 1943, ever since their first meeting in Edinburgh in 1939.
The publication of both books was the result of prolonged and dedicated editorial work, particularly on the part of Douglas Young, during a time in which political upheaval and the outbreak of World War II pressured the literary commitments of the Gaelic and Scots literati. MacLean wrote to Young from Catterick Camp that ‘no one else has ever done so much for me as you have done, intellectually and materially.’
While Dàin do Eimhir undoubtedly caused stronger ripples in the Scottish Gaelic literary waters, Douglas Young’s own poetry deserves more attention for its significant place in the canon of mid-20th century Scots poetry. While MacLean and Young had differing political stances, both Auntran Blads and Dàin do Eimhir are in the unique position of containing poems which respond to the theme of crisis in Europe and the political and literary reactions of Gaelic and Scots poets during this time. This paper will examine the points of connection in these poetry collections, including Young’s Scots translations of MacLean’s Gaelic poetry.

Gabrielle Fath

Cultural hybridity and ageing: the representation of older women across Iain Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s Gaelic and English works

Among twentieth-century Gaelic writers, Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn (known in English as Iain Crichton Smith) is viewed as a particularly cross-cultural and cosmopolitan writer, influenced by Latin and Greek classical literature, by philosophers like Kierkegaard (Bateman, 2013), or even by existentialists like Camus and Sartre (MacLeod, 2007). He was extremely prolific in both Gaelic and English, which has led scholars to examine the theme of bilingualism and cultural hybridity in his works (MacLeod, 2001; Watson, 2014), with some focusing on the notion of ‘linguistic exile’ in his works (Berton, 2010).

Across his English and Gaelic works, as well as across forms (poetry, fiction and drama), the figure of the older woman appears extensively, making her a culturally hybrid figure, caught between traditional Gaelic culture and Anglophone modernity. As such, she is a particularly useful figure to explore the theme of cultural hybridity in Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s works.

By comparing a selection of poetic and fictional works in English and Gaelic, this paper argues that older women are represented as liminal, cross-cultural figures in Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s works, with different realisations in Gaelic and English, and across forms. As ageing studies scholar Margaret Gullette maintains, we are ‘aged by culture’ (2003), which makes ageing a culturally and socially realised process, meaning that we can construe intergenerational encounters as intercultural as well. Such encounters with older women take place in a number of the author’s works, such as in the stories ‘An Duine Dubh’, ‘A’ Chailleach’ or ‘Am Maor’ (Watson, 2023) and in his novel Consider the Lilies (1968), or in the poems ‘The Old Lady’ or ‘Haiku’ from Eadar Fealla-Dhà is Glaschu (1974).

By applying an age studies framework (Gullette, 2003) and drawing from existing scholarship on Mac a’ Ghobhainn, I will firstly examine examples of poems and short stories where older women are seen as repositories of tradition, and embodying Gaelic culture. Yet, Iain Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn also inscribes these older women figures within modernity, as they embody cultural contrasts in a number of poetic and prose works. Finally, I will reflect on how they can be construed as liminal figures, through the author’s use of symbolism, across languages and forms.

John Howieson

The literary qualities of a Scots township poet - Billy Henderson

Scotland has a long and honourable tradition of holding its poets in high regard, whether the language used is Scots, Gaelic or English. However, one type of poetry which has received less critical attention is that which has been made over the years by people in a tradition which is also long and honourable – the local bards; and, whereas the work of such poets in Gaelic communities (the so-called ‘bàird baile’) has been acknowledged more in recent years, the same could not be said of those composing in Scots and English. Mary Ellen Brown has called them ‘The Forgotten Makars’. Perhaps it is time now to remember them.
The late Billy Henderson was one such local poet. Living almost all of his 75 years in Dalbeattie, he was well known throughout the community as a singer of traditional and other songs, and this meant he had a ready audience for his own compositions. He made songs in English and in Scots, on topics of local, national and international interest; some are humorous, some are sad and moving, and some make a case relation to an issue about which the poet felt strongly – whether in politics, on the environment or on other social matters. The lyrics show his skill in versification, his humour and his humanity.
Billy Henderson’s singing entertained people his whole life – from his childhood through to days before his sudden death. He had an enormous repertoire of songs composed by others, but he also fulfilled the role of local bard, singing and reciting his own poems, reflecting issues of importance in his own community and far beyond. He was thus an honourable member of a tradition that goes back beyond the earliest written records of humanity, and which has shown great longevity in parts of Scotland. His works deserve to be recognised on that basis, with detailed literary analysis showing the poet’s artistry.

Prof. Nigel Leask

‘The Deeds of the Dead Remain’: Joseph Macleod’s ‘Open Letter to the Countess of Sutherland’

My paper revisits this late (1978) poem in relation to Joseph Macleod’s life-long interest in the Highland Clearances and his family history, linking it with the work of the Adam Drinan period, especially The Ghosts of the Strath (1943). It uncovers new evidence from Macleod’s correspondence (and elsewhere) relating to its composition in the wake of the ‘Dunrobin Controversy’ of 1977, when the Countess of Sutherland ‘renounced’ her presidency of the annual National Mòd in the wake of a public outcry. Relating the poem to Gaelic bardic tradition and Macleod clan history, it explores the context of the Kildonan Clearances (1813-19) and the role of the poet’s ancestor Donald Macleod, Dominie of Kildonan. The poem also narrates the theft (sometime later in the 19th century) by the Sutherland family of Macleod’s Session Book and Journal, key testimonies to the catastrophic events of the Clearance, an episode discussed in the final section.

Daisy, Li Li

Gaelic Poetry in Chinese

One of the foremost advocates of Scottish poetry in China was Wang Zuoliang (王佐良, 1916–1995), a poet, critic, translator, editor and, in his later career, Director of the Research Institute of Foreign Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). A distinguished translator of Robert Burns and a variety of other Scottish poets, older and contemporary, Wang was particularly interested in the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean. Wang’s understanding of MacLean’s work was limited by his lack of knowledge of Gaelic, but deepened by meeting him in person, along with other writers such as Ian Crichton Smith, during a visit to Scotland in 1982. Wang described these encounters in an essay published in China as ‘Friends in Oban and Skye’. Poems by Sorley MacLean, Ian Crichton Smith, and Derrick Thomson were also included in an anthology of modern Scottish poetry, translated into Chinese by Zhang Jian (张剑,1963- ), and published in Beijing in 2002.
Zhang effectively follows and expands upon Wang’s project of introducing a range of Scottish poetry – in English, Scots and Gaelic – to Chinese readers. This paper reflects on Wang’s essay about his visit to Skye and Oban, and considers the strategies he draws upon in his Chinese versions of those Gaelic poems he chooses to translate. Wang proposed a theory of ‘affinity’ as well as a ‘holistic’ approach to poetic translation.
This paper compares the English versions of a selection of the Gaelic poems that Wang and Zhang used as source texts alongside the Chinese target texts and so illustrates their methods of reworking poetry that was originally in Gaelic for a Chinese readership.

Aonghas MacLeòid

Dread and Revelation in Dòmhnall Mac na Ceàrdaich’s Short Stories

Dòmhnall Mac na Ceàrdaich was a highly innovative Gaelic writer based in Edinburgh, London and Manchester in the early decades of the 20th century. As well as drama and poetry, his innovations in prose explored new avenues for Gaelic writing. This paper will look at three of his short stories ‘Canach an t-Sléibhe’ (1915); ’Uamh an Oir’ (1917) and ‘Lughain Lir’ (1921) to examine how the writer creates dread and anticipation in each work building to a revelation at the end. It will consider parallels with other Scottish and Celtic Revival short stories of the period.

Dr Kevin MacNeil

The Shape of Seeing: Colour, Shape, and Moral Vision in Iain Crichton Smith’s Work

This talk will explore a relatively under-examined aspect of Iain Crichton Smith’s work: the role of visual form – specifically colour and spatial arrangement – as a structuring principle across both poetry and prose. I will suggest that recurrent features such as chromatic restraint (particularly stark contrasts of white, black, and occasional red), along with geometric patterns of enclosure and hierarchy (rooms, windows, vertical authority figures, framed spaces), constitute a kind of moral architecture within the work.
I will seek to show how these visual elements operate not simply as descriptive features, but as ways of staging ethical tension, particularly around authority, exposure, and the solitary individual. I will also touch briefly on Smith’s own reflections on geometry, and on his engagement with visual art, in order to suggest a broader compositional consciousness at work. In addition, I will gesture towards how this visual structuring intersects with questions of perception and bilingualism, drawing on his well-known metaphor of looking out through “two windows” as distinct modes of seeing.’

Catherine MacPhee and Sorcha Dallas

Three Voices, Living Archives: Gaelic Presence and Cultural Translation in Twentieth-century Scotland

This collaborative paper brings Alasdair Gray and John Purser into dialogue through a focused examination of their artistic practices, read alongside newly available archival and oral history material. Drawing on holdings from The Alasdair Gray Archive and a recent oral history interview with Purser conducted by the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre, the paper explores how both figures engage with Gaelic culture as a living, shaping presence within twentieth-century Scottish artistic production.
Using archival drafts, marginalia, and visual material, the paper traces Gray’s evolving engagement with Scotland’s multilingual inheritance. These materials reveal how his formal experimentation and narrative voice repeatedly gesture towards Gaelic history and modes of thought, even when working primarily in English and Scots, positioning Gaelic culture as structurally embedded rather than thematically peripheral.
In parallel, the paper examines Purser’s compositional practice through new oral history testimony, in which he reflects on his relationship to Gaelic song and tradition, and on the challenges of cultural transmission across linguistic boundaries. This material offers fresh insight into Purser’s understanding of Gaelic music as a contemporary, adaptive form rather than a static inheritance.
Together, these case studies illuminate shared strategies of translation, recovery, and cultural negotiation, and argue that Gray and Purser each articulate a vision of Scotland as a “three-voiced country” shaped by dynamic cross-currents between Gaelic, Scots, and English. Delivered jointly by Catherine McPhee (Archivist, Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre) and Sorcha Dallas (Custodian, The Alasdair Gray Archive), the paper demonstrates the critical value of archival collaboration in rethinking twentieth-century Scottish cultural history.

Anne Morrison

Negotiating the contact zone: the politics of translation in contemporary Scottish Gaelic literature

The paper argues that the process of literary translation can be used as a vehicle for innovation rather than, as has previously been argued by some, proving detrimental to the development of Gaelic language and literature. Excerpts from an interview conducted in 2008 with Aonghas MacNeacail, combined with an overview of the translation debate published in Chapman magazine (1998) and the literary magazine, Northwords Now, provide the basis for an exploration of the political ramifications of translation.
Some questions raised and discussed in the paper include: Is translation now a fundamental part of the packaging and presentation of contemporary Gaelic poetry? How big an impact does the changing parameters of the Gaidhealtachd have on Gaelic literature? Are all poems written in the Gaelic language Gaelic in nature – and does it matter? Is it ever possible to fully appreciate literature in translation? Is the process of self-translation a desirable approach or a problematic one? Are the roles of creator and translator really so far apart in a post-modern world? In addressing these questions, Morrison frames the debate against the backdrop of the Literary Lights and the Scottish literary renaissance. The author also investigates theoretical models to provide insight into the debate and to draw meaningful conclusions about future directions.

This paper was first produced as part of the author’s UHI Highlands & Islands Literate MA, for which she gained a First Class with Distinction in 2008.

Elaine Morrison

A woman of mony pairts - the tripartite influences of Scotland’s languages in the poetry of Helen B Cruickshank (1886-1975)

Poet and cultural activist, Helen B Cruickshank, is situated at the heart of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, yet her poetry is not widely known and out of print except for a few regularly anthologised works. Whilst she writes only in her native North East Scots and English, Scottish Gaelic language and traditions have played an important part in her poetry and informing her worldview.
It is evident that Cruickshank was a cultural sponge – soaking up every drop of inspiration from her self-education, extensive network of contacts and correspondents and her walking tours of Scotland – in particular the Hebrides and the Angus Glens. Through a critical reading of her work, supplemented with archival research, this paper explores the tripartite influences of Scotland’s languages in Cruickshank’s literary legacy.

Donald S Murray

The Bilingual Basis of Creativity

It is intention to speak about the bilingual contribution to creativity. Much of my focus will be on the inventive mindset of a number of Macleans who – like part of my own ancestry – came from Tiree. These will include John Maclean (1787-1848) who settled in Nova Scotia and, together with his brother, wrote Gaelic poetry there, Alastair Maclean (the thriller writer), Shona Maclean, Sir Donald Maclean (a politician), Ewen Maclean, and Donald Duart Maclean who used his creative skills for espionage.
I will also mention others with Inner Hebridean connections. These will include other Macleans, such as the Gaelic poet, Sorley Maclean (Raasay) and Norman Maclean, who wrote ‘A River Runs Through It’ and ‘Young Men And Fire’ (Coll).
I will finish by mentioning Alistair Macleod – a Canadian writer whose family had their origins in both Caoe Breton and Eigg.

Petra Poncarová

Contacts between Gaelic and Scots in Twentieth-Century Gaelic Magazines

This paper examines contacts between Gaelic and Scots in twentieth-century Gaelic magazines. It first explores Scots-related content in the periodicals edited by Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar (1900s–1930s), which featured new Scots writing and extensive discussion of the relationship between Scots and Gaelic, their literary traditions, and their roles in the nationalist movement. The second part turns to Gairm (1952–2002), focusing on Derick Thomson’s editorial references to Scots, the 1978 SNP Gaelic policy published in the magazine, reviews of Scots writing, and Gaelic translations from Scots, including an extract from Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Across both Erskine’s periodicals and Gairm, the paper highlights the networks of Gaelic writers in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire, London, and the global diaspora (Canada, Australia, South Africa), and considers how these urban and overseas centres of Gaelic activity interacted with the Scots literary scene.

Alan Riach

Contexts, texts and resistance: MacLean, Garioch, MacDiarmid

In the contexts and aftermaths of war and confrontation, the alliances between Gaelic, Scots and English were manifest in two key publications of 1940: 17 Poems for 6d and The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry. The former 28-page pamphlet collects work by Sorley MacLean and Robert Garioch, the latter 415-page volume brings work in Scots, English and English translation from Gaelic and Latin, including the editor’s translations of the two great Gaelic poems by Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, each composed in the aftermath of Culloden. Both pamphlet and anthology form a consolidation of resistance, reappraisal and an extension of national self-definition.
This paper offers some consideration of the significance of the inter-relationships of these works in the context of the Second World War and the prospect of recovery from it, with some personal account of organising the first joint reading of MacLean and Garioch together in Cambridge in 1977, and the translator’s priorities in my own versions of the 18th-century poems, completed just after the failure of the 2014 independence referendum.

Smilla Steiner

“Strange in His Foreign Tongue”: Language and Identity in Simon Taylor’s Mortimer’s Deep (1992)

Set in the early thirteenth-century at the Priory of Inchcolm, Simon Taylor’s novel Mortimer’s Deep (1992) follows the life of Augustinian monk Brother Michael. The protagonist encounters many of Scotland’s medieval languages, such as Norman French, Latin, Middle Gaelic, and Inglis. The novel enacts the multilingualism it portrays through a process of language substitution. The dialogues diegetically held in Middle Gaelic are written in modern Scots in the novel, so as to be distinct from the rest of the text but remain understandable by most English speakers with the help of a glossary. Thus, the novel presents a linguistic tension: modern Scots is featured in the novel, but not to represent its own ancestor, Inglis. Conversely, Gaelic is represented but ultimately absent from the text. Through this choice, Mortimer’s Deep draws links between the use of language in thirteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland and presents a Scottish identity rooted in language.

Inglis, Middle Gaelic and their use are commented on both in the novel and the glossary. Inglis is described as a “foreign tongue” (55) which by opposition implies Middle Gaelic is a Scottish language. Hence, the novel draws attention to modern Scots – singled out as different from the main narrative language and used to represent the “Scottish language” of the past – as a language that gained its status of Scottish language over time, in response to the standardisation of English. Taylor also remarks that both Middle Gaelic and modern Scots are associated with the lower classes in their respective eras (442). Hence, through its juxtaposition of medieval and modern linguistic contexts, Mortimer’s Deep emphasises that the language of Scotland is that of the people, preferably in opposition to the elites and to standardised English. In looking for ways to make the past intelligible to the present, the text ultimately comments on both periods, using each as a tool to interpret the other.

Abstracts

Anne Ciecko

Dr Hilary Clydesdale & Dr Ainsley McIntosh

John Corbett

Emma Dymock

Gabrielle Fath

John Howieson

Prof. Nigel Leask

Daisy, Li Li

Aonghas MacLeòid

Dr Kevin MacNeil

Catherine MacPhee and Sorcha Dallas

Anne Morrison

Elaine Morrison

Donald S Murray

Petra Poncarová

Alan Riach

Smilla Steiner

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