Morelle Smith is a Scottish author of poetry, essays, fiction, and travel articles who currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. [1]
She studied French and English at the University of Edinburgh. She completed a post-graduate teaching certificate, and also took a course to teach English at the CELTA/RSA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages/Royal Society of Arts), and to teach French at the Centre International d’Études Pédagogiques in Sèvres, France.
After university, she traveled through India and Asia, then lived in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Schwarzwald, where she modeled for drawing classes. She has participated in Writers' Residences in Serbia, Switzerland, and France. She worked for an NGO in Albania. She has also traveled to the US and throughout Europe. Sketches from her travels with musician John Renbourn are included in her work, Every Shade of Blue.
She writes reviews at Levure Litteraire [2] and the Scottish Review. [3]
Her first published work was a short story, A Sleeping Sentry at the Gate of Time, in ChapmanMagazine, 1980. Since then, her work has been translated into several languages, including French, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Albanian. Her poem, The Ravens and the Lemon Tree was reviewed in the poetry prose reviews magazine Acumen, [4] in May 2010, where it says, "She has a fine lyric gift."
Violet Jacob was a Scottish writer known especially for her historical novel Flemington and for her poetry, mainly in Scots. She was described by a fellow Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid as "the most considerable of contemporary vernacular poets".
Anna "Nan" Shepherd was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.
Aleks Çaçi was an Albanian author of the socialist realism period.
Mimoza Ahmeti from Kruja is an Albanian woman poet, winner of the first Festival of poetry of SanRemo,1988, organised by RAI. She is named by Robert Elsie, enfant terrible. Mimoza is a post doc lecturer in psychotherapie. She graduated Phd degree in SFU Vienna, excellent, posst doc at SFU Paris.
Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar.
Ervin Hatibi, Albanian poet, essayist and painter. Hatibi was born in Tirana, Albania, on May 31, 1974. At the age of 14, Hatibi published his first poems in the literary pages of the main newspapers of the epoch. His first poetry collection Përditë Shoh Qiellin, Naim Frashëri, Tirana prefaced by Ismail Kadare, was published in 1989 when he was only 15 and was widely acclaimed by the critics of the communist regime. At that time, following the sudden fame of the young author and his grooming as future national poet of the communist state, the National Film Studios of Albania "Shqiperia e Re", produced a documentary film on his works, entitled "The 15 Year Old Poet".
Jennie Erdal was a Scottish writer. She was the author of Ghosting, a memoir of her childhood in a Fife mining village and of being the long-serving ghostwriter of Naim Attallah, the publisher and owner of Quartet Books.
Irma Kurti is a well-known Albanian poet, writer, lyricist, journalist and translator. She is a naturalized Italian citizen.
Christopher Whyte is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic. He is a novelist in English, a poet in Scottish Gaelic, the translator into English of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Maria Rilke, and an innovative and controversial critic of Scottish and international literature. His work in Gaelic appears under the name Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin.
Luljeta Lleshanaku is an Albanian poet who is the recipient of the 2009 Crystal Vilenica award for European poets. She was educated in literature at the University of Tirana and was editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Zëri i rinisë. She then worked for the literary newspaper Drita (Light). In 1996, she received the best book of the year award from the Eurorilindja Publishing House. In 1999, she took part in the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. She is the author of four poetry collections, one volume of which has been translated into English: Fresco, available from New Directions. The writer, critic and editor Peter Constantine, in his introduction to Fresco, sums up her style in this way:
Luljeta Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry. She speaks with a completely original voice, her imagery and language always unexpected and innovative. Her poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the world. And it is not connected to anything in Albanian poetry either. We have in Lleshanaku a completely original poet."
Dhimitër Shuteriqi was an Albanian scholar, literary historian, and writer. He participated in the anti-fascist National Liberation Movement. After the war he was a member of the People's Assembly and one of the founders and later president of the Albanian League of Writers and Artists. In addition to a series of books and novels, he has published numerous volumes of textbooks, especially those of the History of Albanian Literature for high schools.
Rody Gorman is an Irish-born poet who lives in Scotland and whose main creative medium is Scottish Gaelic. He was born in Dublin on 1 January 1960 and now lives in the Isle of Skye, Scotland.
Lidija Dimkovska, born 1971, is a Macedonian poet, novelist and translator. She was born in Skopje and studied comparative literature at the University of Skopje. She proceeded to obtain a PhD in Romanian literature at the University of Bucharest. She has taught Macedonian language and literature at the University of Bucharest and world literature at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia.
Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, publisher and the founding editor of HappenStance Press. She has lived in Fife, Scotland, since 1977.
Valerie Gillies is a Canadian-born poet who grew up in Scotland. She was the second Edinburgh Makar from 2005 to 2008. Gillies has written for literary and arts reviews, the theatre, and BBC radio and television, and has worked with visual artists and musicians. She has also taught creative writing extensively.
Gillian K. Ferguson is a Scottish poet and journalist, born and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the creator of Air for Sleeping Fish (Bloodaxe) and the best-seller, Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. She won a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award and created a major poetry project exploring the human genome called The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life, About her project, she said, "the Genome has remained fascinating throughout; a fantastic, beautiful poem - a magnificent work of Chemistry spanning four billion years of the art of Evolution." The project was praised, including by broadcaster, Andrew Marr of the BBC, Francis Collins, Head of the US Human Genome Project and by philosopher Mary Midgley author of Science and Poetry (Routledge).
Sylvia Kantaris was a British poet, based for much of her life in Cornwall, who published eight collections of poetry, of which two were in collaboration. Her work was widely anthologized and translated into various languages, including Italian, Japanese and Finnish.
Lazër Shantoja was an Albanian blessed, publicist, poet, satirist, and translator into Albanian from Goethe, Schiller and Leopardi, as well as his country's first Esperantist. He was one of the first Catholic priests, arrested by the communist government, and the first Albanian priest that was shot by a firing squad. He was accepted by the Catholic Church as a martyr in 2016, part of the Martyrs of Albania.
Klentiana Mahmutaj is a barrister, author and academic. Mahmutaj was called to the Bar of England & Wales in 2005 and practises from Red Lion Chambers, a leading set of chambers in London. She currently holds an appointment from the United Nations Human Rights Council as an independent expert on the Mechanism on the Right to Development. In 2022, The Daily Telegraph described her as "perhaps – after Rita Ora and fellow singer Dua Lipa – the most high-profile Albanian in Britain".
Majlinda Nana Rama is an Albanian pedagogue, writer and researcher. She is considered the most prominent representative of her literary generation and one of the honored names of today's Albanian literature. She has written poetry, essays, scientific articles, studies, literary criticism, novels, short stories, etc. She is a lecturer at the University of Arts, Tirana.
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