Today we are publishing a blog by Ash Mowat, a volunteer in the Civic Engagement Team, on a little known 19th-century Scottish poet. The Edinburgh-born Louisa Agnes Czarnecki (née Winter) was a versatile, politically engaged writer married to a Polish political exile.

To mark the centenary of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, we are publishing a blog by Ash Mowat, a volunteer in the Civic Engagement Team, which explores the archives of a Scottish survivor. The composer Sheena Tennant Kendall was resident in Japan from 1919 to 1924 and lived through the catastrophe, describing its impact […]

The English writer Walter de la Mare was born 150 years ago this week on 25 April 1873. To mark his anniversary, we are publishing a blog by Ash Mowat, a volunteer in the Civic Engagement Team, which also marks the centenary of Come Hither, de la Mare’s much loved anthology of verse for ‘the […]

Today we’re introducing Charlotte Holmes, a postgraduate student who is doing some volunteer work under the supervision of archivist Aline Brodin. Her main task is to catalogue and box-list two very different collections from our archives, the Archive of Illustrators Richard and Alison Douglas Tod (Coll-2029) and the Archive of productions of Varsity Vanities and […]

Yesterday a plaque was unveiled at the School of Scottish Studies Archives celebrating the centenary of Hamish Henderson, who was born in Blairgowrie on 11 November 1919. As a songwriter, song-collector, poet, and political activist, Henderson is widely acclaimed as the father of Scotland’s post-war Folk Revival. He was appointed as a lecturer and research […]

7 June 2019 marks the centenary of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir, one of Scottish literature’s great creative partnerships. Acclaimed in their own right as poet and novelist respectively, they worked together as a translating team to bring the novels and stories of Franz Kafka to an English-speaking audience. Edinburgh University holds a […]

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of two of George Mackay Brown’s landmark publications, An Orkney Tapestry and A Time to Keep. While Brown was already well established as a poet, these works made his reputation as a master of prose. Unusually, An Orkney Tapestry was a commissioned publication. In late 1967, literary agent Giles […]

March 31 marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of one of Scotland’s most prolific and versatile writers, Andrew Lang (1844-1912). The author or co-author of 249 volumes, Lang worked in fields as varied as anthropology, folklore, classical scholarship, Scottish history, poetry, drama, and children’s writing. As a perennially in-demand journalist, he also penned articles […]