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 2012, South African playwright and novelist, Damon Galgut, will hold the International Writer’s Residency. Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963 and studied drama at the University of Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1984), when he was seventeen. Small Circle of Beings (1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by the novels The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), The Quarry (1995), which was made into a film in 1998, The Good Doctor (2003) and The Imposter (2008). The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book). His latest novel, In a Strange Room (2010), was also shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

“Poised somewhere between a thriller and a parable, and written in a ruthlessly pared-down style, [The Good Doctor] took a scalpel to the ideals of post-apartheid South Africa, exposing a world of corruption and rapacity behind the talk of 'new dawns' and 'reconciliation'… Its success was taken as a portent that a new generation of South African novelists was emerging, one that would topple the old guard of Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee and André Brink… Galgut's fiction…has a dreamlike quality; his plots seem propelled by a logic of their own. In his superb short story 'An African Sermon', the protagonist, an idealistic preacher, is forced to conclude of the bizarre sequence of events that he has witnessed: 'There was no clear moral theme, no uplifting lesson to be learned. There were only shadowy motives and more questions, one behind the other, receding back into the darkness.' These words could be applied to this novel, and, indeed, to all Galgut's work.”
William Skidelsky in the Observer