Promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language
Jenni Calder is a literary historian and novelist. She has edited a number of poetry anthologies, and has written a series of books on the Scottish diaspora, including Scots in Canada and Scots in the USA. Her most recent works include Lost in the Backwoods: Scots in the North American Wilderness, The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison, and Essence of Edinburgh: An Eccentric Odyssey.
Bide the storm ye canna hinder, Minding through the strife, Hoo the luntin’ lowe o’ beauty Lichts the grey o’ life. —Helen Cruickshank, ‘Sea Buckthorn’ It may seem unlikely that a female civil servant brought up in rural Angus should have become a key figure in what she herself did not like to call ‘the […]
The place is Ghana, the year 1957. Naomi Mitchison is in Accra to cover Ghana’s independence celebrations for the Manchester Guardian. At midnight, Kwame Nkrumah speaks, and ‘After the last words he burst into a dance of achievement and joy which was taken up all round.’ The other journalists head off, ‘their minds on drinks […]
Naomi Mitchison lived for almost the whole of the twentieth century and achieved in that time more than could reasonably be expected of a single individual. She worked energetically for political and social causes. She played a forceful part in the remote Argyll community of Carradale, where she and her husband, lawyer and MP G. […]