In this book, the author goes on a disturbing journey through his family archive, which yields up a horrific—yet not uncommon—story about his Fergusson ancestors’ involvement in Caribbean plantations where they owned, bought, and sold enslaved Africans. But this book is much more than just a family story. It also contextualises that story within the wider history of Scottish landowners and British imperial society, demonstrating how enmeshed every aspect of the British economy was with slavery and the subtle (sometimes all too invisible) ways that this legacy continues today. This book also addresses contemporary debates around reparations, tacking the question: what does a family, like the author’s own, owe to these countries where plantations were located (Jamaica and Tobago, in this instance) and its peoples—and by extension what do all of us in countries, like the UK, who have benefitted, however indirectly, owe?  And should this debt to be viewed as something more than just a financial obligation? And if so, what might that entail? In pursuing these questions, and many others, the author travels to Jamaica and Tobago to speak with those still living on or near the land his ancestors occupied. He also interviews local teachers, scholars, residents, and policy makers all of whom have a wide variety of views, contributing fresh and at times unexpected perspectives.

All proceeds from the book Blood Legacy go to a host of youth developmental projects and educational institutions in the Caribbean. For more information, see the following link:

UofEd Writer Conversations | Allyson Stack in Conversation with Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy | 8/3

A James Tait Black Visiting Writers Series event. Friday 17 February, 10.00-11.30 – limited to 16 students, postgraduates, and/or doctoral researchers. Please sign up by emailing simon.cooke@ed.ac.uk by Monday 13 February at the latest.

Students will be expected to read a few very short extracts from Spark’s writing – fiction, autobiography, and biography – in advance (pdfs will be circulated by email).

A James Tait Black Visiting Writers Series Event. 5.00-6.00pm, with reception to follow, Monday 13 February, G.01, ground floor, 50 George Square

A conversation on writing lives with the brilliant biographer and critic Frances Wilson. Frances Wilson has written exhilarating biographies, as daring as they are elegant, with remarkable historical range, which all raise questions and shape new possibilities for the forms of life-writing. In tonight’s interview, chaired by Simon Cooke, Frances will be speaking across her work as a biographer and on issues in writing lives, and gives an insight into her work on her current book – on Muriel Spark.

This event and the associated masterclass launches the James Tait Black Visiting Writers Series, launched in 2023 thanks to the generosity of a former JTB Prize winner, who wishes to remain anonymous. The gift to the Prizes is being used to establish a James Tait Black Library and Archive, as well as this visiting writers series.

2-3pm, Thursday, 11 November, 2021 from 2-3pm in the Project Room, 50 George Square. A one-hour research in progress panel on ‘non-normative lives’, proposed and with presentations by Edinburgh doctoral researchers and James Tait Black Biographer readers Nicole Chen and Charley Matthews, followed by discussion.

Nicole Xuan Chen: ‘Reflective Life-Writing on Disability: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (2021)’ 

Abstract: The term “reflective biography” is used to connote biography that self-reflexively reflects on life-writing generic forms it enacts, or a piece of life-writing that situates on the blurred boundaries between biography and autobiography and exhibits a flexible and fluid notion of referentiality. Using the term in the latter sense, I read Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (2021) by Emily Rapp Black, a JTB Prize candidate this year, as an explicit reflective life-writing text on disability. Examining it from the perspective of narrative medicine, I intend to discuss the importance of narrative and life-writing to individuals with disability and patients whose living experiences deviated from the “normalcy” in their journeys towards self-identification.

Bio: Nicole Xuan Chen is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her project centres on a sudden cluster of biofictions published within a decade or so from the end of last century that feature Virginia Woolf as the main protagonist-subject. Under the broad framework of experimental life-writing, she studies them thematically via such lenses as illness narrative, image-text intersectionality, and the modernist culture of conversation. She is also interested in medical humanities and is a research member at the Bio-Health Narrative Research Centre at the Southern Medical University (PRC). She is on the reader panel for James Tait Black Prize and is the editor and chief Chinese translator of the monograph Literary Medicine: Brain Diseases and Doctors in Novels, Theatre, and Film.

Charley Matthews: ‘Non-normative lives and the ethics of the private diary’ 

Abstract: Various life-writing scholars have argued that women and gender-nonconforming people have often used diaries to explore an interior world that feels at odds with the dominant values of a society based around strictly gendered codes of behaviour. But what happens when non-normative bodies enter the equation? How do we justify reading and analysing the ostensibly private thoughts of a marginalised person, when the scholarly institutions from which we produce our analysis are inevitably built on hegemonic assumptions and foundations? To paraphrase Saidiya Hartman, does this not re-enact a further violence on these people’s subjectivities and identities? This informal paper is the beginnings of an attempt to think through some of these ethical questions around working with the diaries of marginalised people, drawing on JTB prize submission Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, as well as my own experiences working with the manuscript diaries of queer nineteenth-century landowner Anne Lister.

Bio: Charley Matthews is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Their thesis examines the reading practices of queer women and gender-nonconforming people in the nineteenth century, working with letters, diaries, and other lifewriting from the period. Their research interests also include publishing history, narratology, and the novel. In 2021, they presented at SHARP’s conference “Moving Texts,” and at a conference on “Gender and the Book Trades” at the University of St Andrews.

Weds 19 February 2020, 12:30-18:00, Project Room, 50 George Square. A one-day life-writing colloquium including a James Tait Black Biography Readers’ Discussion, research-in-progress presentations, and work-in-progress readings, with a visiting talk linked to the English Literature Seminar.

Schedule

12:30-13.20    James Tait Black Prize in Biography 2020: Readers’ Discussion (JTB Co-ordinators June Laurenson, Alice Rae and others)

13:30-14:30    Doctoral Research Panel on Biofiction

• Alan Goodson: ‘Biofiction: Definitions and Distinctions – the Case of Henry James’
• Nicole Chen: ‘The New Biography’ and Biofiction: A Study on Generic Narrative Characteristics

14:30-15:00 Tea/Coffee

Work in Progress Readings

15:00-15:30    Simon Cooke: ‘Childhood Reading’, from Gathering Gifts

15:30-16.15    Allyson Stack: ‘Writing from Life’, from All That Is Left Unsaid  

16:30-18:00   English Literature Seminar: Prof. Alison Light: “Technologies of the Self?”: Diaries and Life-writing (including my own)’ [talk cancelled; to be re-scheduled]

1-2pm, Friday, 23 March, 2018, DHT, LG.06). A one-hour panel on ‘Lives in the Archive’, exploring the place of archives in literature, life-writing, and cultural history, with visiting speakers Alison Light and Dora Osborne. Position papers will be followed by discussion.

Chair: Jonathan Wild

Alison Light is a writer and currently also Honorary Professorial Fellow in the English Department at Edinburgh University. Alison will talk about some of the different ways in which archives have been central to her work as both a literary critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars (1991); Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2006); and Common People: the History of an English Family (2014). She also spent several years helping to establish the Raphael Samuel Centre and Archive in London.

Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at St Andrews. Her research focuses on questions of trauma and memory in relation to Germany’s National Socialist past and her current project considers the role of the archive in Holocaust memory culture. She has published widely on contemporary German literature, memorial projects and visual culture. Dora will talk about ‘Lives in the Archive of National Socialism: Recent German Literature and the Archival Turn’.

Simon Cooke is a Lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh. His talk – ‘“The Blank Page”: Muriel Spark and the Literary Archive’ – is on the Muriel Spark archives at the McFarlin Library, Tulsa, and at the National Library of Scotland, and the modern literary archive more widely.