International Writer’s Residency

In conjunction with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, the School has established an International Writer’s Residency. This will bring a writer from outside the United Kingdom to pursue his or her own creative work in St Andrews.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) was born in St Andrews, studied at Edinburgh College of Art, and later became one of the foremost painters of the renowned St Ives School in Cornwall, a group of British artists which included Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She established the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, based at her family home in Balmungo, St Andrews, in 1987. The Trust’s purpose is to encourage new artists, as well as securing Barns-Graham’s work and archive for future generations.

The Trust has made comfortable accommodation in the house available for the International Writer’s Residency, co-hosted by the School of English. The Trust believes that artists working in other media, such as the written or spoken word, will benefit and be inspired by working in this creative environment, surrounded by Barns-Graham’s art.

A poet or novelist of international distinction will take up the four-month residency at Balmungo in the autumn of each year, beginning in 2011, and will receive a stipend from the School of English, allowing them to engage in uninterrupted creative work for that period. The Resident Writer will give a public reading at the University, and will meet occasionally with postgraduate creative writing students during the period of their residency.

In 2011, the International Writer’s Residency will be held by the poet Karen Solie, widely regarded as the leading Canadian poet of her generation. Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and currently resides in Toronto, Ontario. Her most recent collection, Pigeon, won the 2010 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.

“ It may be, as Solie suggests, that ‘the honourable life/is like timing. One might not have the talent for it.’ Among the greatest of Solie’s talents, evident throughout the poems of Pigeon, is an ability to see at once into and through our daily struggle, often thwarted by our very selves, toward something like an honourable life.”

Judges’ citation, Griffin Prize