Jen Hadfield & Christine de Luca

SEPTEMBER FRIDAY 17

Jen Hadfield & Christine de Luca

Two of Shetland’s best-known and best-loved poets will be in conversation with Jim Mainland at this event, introducing their new collections. Christine de Luca’s Veeve features a rich mix of poems in English and Shetlandic; Jen Hadfield’s The Stone Age focuses on landscape and language, and the diverse ways in which we see and experience the world.

The Stone Age

Jen Hadfield’s new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon.

Veeve

This is Christine de Luca’s first full collection for some years, and has been hailed by Tom Pow as “alive with outward-looking, generous poems”.

Fri 20.30 Online £7.50

Jen Hadfield

Jen Hadfield’s fourth poetry collection The Stone Age explores neurodiversity and was published by Picador in March 2021. She is also working on a collection of essays about Shetland, where she lives. Passionately involved with the wild world, she uses poetry, lyrical essay and occasionally sculpture in cast porcelain, to try and share her intense experience of the here-and-now. Her work has garnered numerous awards, including the 2008 T.S.Eliot Prize for her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, (Bloodaxe). She has performed her work internationally, attending festivals and residencies in – amongst other countries - Iraq, New Zealand and Canada. She is a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow at Glasgow University and is building a house in Shetland, very slowly.

Christine De Luca

Christine De Luca (nee Pearson) was born and brought up in Shetland, spending her formative years in Waas (Walls) on the west side of the mainland. She now lives in Edinburgh. She writes in English and in Shetland dialect which is a blend of Old Scots with much Norse influence. Shetland dialect - or “Shetlandic” - is a lively mother tongue, still vibrant and enjoyed both for its onomatopoeic quality and its classlessness. Her main interest is poetry, but she is also active in promoting work with Shetland children and has written dialect stories for a range of age-groups. In addition to this, her first novel, And then forever was published in 2011. She was appointed Edinburgh’s poet laureate (Makar) for a three year period, between 2014 and 2017.