Authors

Vagabond is committed to introducing new titles from Scottish authors and translating fiction from other languages. Our library reflects our aims to promote literary ambition and innovative writers, and to challenge readers.

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Jidi Majia

Jidi Majia’s work, while translated into other European and Asian languages, has never previously been available in the English-speaking world. Mither Tongue is however a unique introduction in both Scots and English to the work of this eminent ethnic poet from China’s Sichuan region.

He has published numerous poetic anthologies since the 1980s and has won national literature awards, and is considered one of the greatest poets amongst the minorities in China. He is the President of the China Minority Literary Association. His themes, while embedded in his Nuosu culture, are timely explorations of what it means to be at one with nature and his fellow humans.

He writes with humility and compassion, with a wide-ranging knowledge of all Chinese literatures across the dynasties and embracing present-day Chinese poetics. His assimilation of the world’s great literatures, together with expertise in Chinese and Nuosu literatures leads to an astonishing tour de force in which everything gains this dual orientation: on one hand it is rooted in the land-based, tribal sensibility of the Nuosu, and on the other hand it is characterised by expansive subjectivity reaching out into the modern world.

Corrado Alvaro was born in San Luca, Calabria in 1895, the son of a primary school teacher. When he was ten, he was sent to the Jesuit College in Frascati where he mixed with sons of the upper circles. In 1910 he was expelled for reading a banned work, Carducci’s Hymn to Satan, but he was already well-read and had studied avidly, even producing his first poetry. He had completed his studies in Calabria, and enlisted in the army in 1915, only to be badly wounded in 1916. He then embarked on his precocious career as a journalist, rising to editor of Il Resto del Carlino and then moving to Milan to work for Corriere dells Sera in 1919. In 1921 he became the foreign correspondent of Amendola’s Il Mondo in Paris, and in 1925 he signed Benedetto Croce’s Manifesto of the Antifascist Intellectuals. His literary career advanced until 1951, when he won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega, with his novel Almost a Life. In 1954, he was taken ill with stomach cancer which spread to his lungs, and in 1956 he died at his home in Rome where he left behind several unfinished novels. The translated Fear in the World was published in 2020.

Born in Bridge of Weir in 1961, Stewart Ennis began his career as a journalist and a nurse, but now works as a writer, actor, lecturer and occasional photographer. He was a founding member of the acclaimed Benchtours theatre ensemble with whom he created many touring shows throughout the nineties and noughties. For several years he was creative writing lecturer at HMP Shotts and other Scottish prisons, and worked with Vagabond Voices on an anthology of prison writing (Visiting Time). He’s had short stories and poems published in Gutter Magazine, The Curlew (Wales), The Caterpillar (Ireland) and various other anthologies. He was an early recipient of a Playwright Studio Scotland Ignite award and has written a number of works for theatre including, The Darkroom, Robert Burns’ Celtic Complex, One Straight Line, The Taking of Zena Charbonne, and The Monster and Mary Shelley. In 2019 he was awarded the Aberdeen-Curtin Alliance scholarship to study a PhD within the creative departments of Aberdeen University and Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Blessed Assurance (Vagabond Voices, 2019) is his first novel.

Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley have been working and writing together since meeting as PhD students at the University of Glasgow. Their essays and short fiction have been published in a variety of places including Gutter Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Together they co-edited the collection Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form (Gylphi, 2015). They live in Victoria BC and Glasgow respectively.

Paul Kavanagh

Paul Kavanagh was born in the East End of Glasgow in 1962 and got involved in online Scottish politics and digital media while living in Spain with Andy, his English partner of 25 years. He contributed to Newsnet Scotland from its early days during the 2011 Holyrood elections right up until February 2013 when Andy’s declining health meant that they had to return to Scotland where there was a support network of friends and family.

Shortly afterwards, Andy was sadly diagnosed with vascular dementia and his health deteriorated rapidly. Stuck indoors as a full-time carer, Paul began the Wee Ginger Dug blog. It was better to laugh than to cry at the hand life had dealt him. And as the referendum campaign progressed, our Unionist politicians generously provided him with a great deal worth mocking. 

Andy passed away just before the independence vote, but Paul continued to blog and to write. Early in 2015 he was offered a weekly column in The National, and is grateful to the then editor Richard Walker for giving a wee dug a weekly bone to chew over. His columns have proven so popular that he's now writing twice a week for The National, as well as a monthly column in iScot Magazine.

Paul remains heavily involved in the independence campaign and does speaking engagements the length and breadth of the country. He has once more found personal happiness with a new husband. He's also soon due to publish the fruits of a project he's been working on for many years, drawing detailed Gaelic maps of Scotland. In 2015 Vagabond Voices published Paul’s first collection of articles from The National, titled Barking Up the Right Tree (2015), and a year later published a follow-up: Barking up the Right Tree 2016.

Zigmunds Skujiņš, one of Latvia’s leading writers of the late twentieth century, was born in the Latvian capital, Riga, in 1926. Author of ten novels and fifteen short story collections, Skujiņš has had his works translated into many languages (over seven million copies of his works have been sold in more than a dozen languages).

Skujiņš has received many honorary titles, including Emeritus Member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (1998), and many awards, including the Latvian Annual Prize for Literature (2003), the Aleksandrs Čaks Prize (2005), and the Latvian Government Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2007).

Born in 1979 in Edinburgh, Iain Morrison is a poet, musician and performance artist. Currently based in the Scottish capital, he has also lived and worked in Cambridge (where he studied music at the University), Bristol and Berlin. He works in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery where he is responsible for cross-artform events and has commissioned poets, including Forward Prize-winner Vahni Capildeo, to write responses to exhibitions. He performs regularly around the UK, from Orkney to Manchester. Performance work includes “a durational installation” in Berlin where he read aloud every Emily Dickinson poem. He tries to keep track of his activities and thinking at permanentpositions.wordpress.com

Helen Lamb was a fiction writer and poet whose work was widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Many of her stories were broadcast on radio, and her poems have been reproduced as National Poetry Day postcards. She received Scottish Arts Council writing bursaries in 1999 and 2002, and was appointed a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in 2003. Helen’s books include a poetry collection with Magi Gibson titled Strange Fish (Duende, 1997), and a short story collection, Superior Bedsits (Polygon, 2001). Helen died in 2017, shortly after completing her first novel, Three Kinds of Kissing.

Kathrine Sowerby

Kathrine Sowerby is a writer living in Glasgow and her poems, stories and translations have been published widely. She has an MFA from Glasgow School of Art, an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University, and won a 2013 New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust. Her chapbooks include Unnecessarily Emphatic (Red Ceilings Press), Margaret and Sunflower (dancing girl press), Tired Blue Mountain (Red Ceilings Press) and her full collection That Bird Loved was published in 2017 by Hesterglock Press. Vagabond Voices has published two of her books: a collection of three novellas titled The Spit, the Sound and the Nest (2017), and a prose poetry collection titled House However (2018). Find out more at kathrinesowerby.com

Gerry Loose

Born in 1948, Gerry Loose has lived in England, Ireland, Spain, Morocco (briefly) and now Scotland. A slow-moving nomad, he is poet, writer and land artist who works primarily with subjects from the natural world, as well as the world of geopolitics. His poems and texts are as often found in built and natural settings as on the page.

He also designs and makes gardens. His poetry is as likely to appear in these (and ungardened landscapes) as on the page.

Among his most recent publications are Printed on Water, New and Selected Poems (Shearsman Books), and that person himself. Vagabond Voices has published two of his poetry collections: fault line (2014) and night exposures (2018). His awards include the Creative Scotland Award, the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, the Kooneen Säätiö Award, the Hermann Kesten Award and the Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley Award. 

Andrei Ivanov

Andrei Ivanov was born in Estonia in 1971 and grew up in “a typical Russian working-class family”. Although he sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition, he identifies Estonia as his home country and his creative point of departure. Having graduated from Tallinn University as a Russian philologist and written his thesis on the language of Vladimir Nabokov, Ivanov briefly worked as a teacher, travelled to Scandinavia and explored Denmark for a number of years living in a hippy commune. His Russian-language novels, Hanuman’s Travels (2009), Bizarre (2013) and Confession of a Lunatic (2015), drew on his experiences in Scandinavia. The Harbin Moths (2013), won the prestigious literary prize NOS in Russia. Hanuman’s Travels was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (2010) and won the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Prize for Russian-Language Literature (2010). First published in Tallinn in 2009, it was released in Moscow in 2010, translated into Estonian (2012), German (2012) and French (2016), and staged at Thalia Theatre (Hamburg, 2014) by Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo of Theatre NO99.

David Widgery

David Widgery was born in London in 1947 and died in 1992. He lived and worked as a socialist doctor in the East End of London for twenty-two years. He was the author of six books: The Left in Britain 1956 – 68 (1976), Health in Danger (1979), Beating Time (1986), The National Health (1988), Preserving Disorder (1989), and Some Lives!: A GP's East End (1991). He was a regular contributor to the New Statesman and Society, Socialist Worker and The British Medical Journal as well as writing occasional articles for numerous underground and socialist magazines and journals. He also wrote articles for the Guardian and Observer newspapers.  

Allan Cameron

Allan Cameron was born in 1952, grew up in Nigeria and Bangladesh, and lived as a young adult in Italy. He has written two novels, The Golden Menagerie (Luath Press, 2004), partly based on Apuleius's The Golden Ass but also a polemic against it, and The Berlusconi Bonus (Luath Press, 2005), a political satire principally directed at Western consumerism, the policies of Bush and Blair, and Fukuyama's now disowned victory song of American capitalism. His non-fiction work, In Praise of the Garrulous (2008), is an examination of the essentiality of language to human nature. His two collections of short stories, Can the Gods Cry? and On the Heroism of Mortals, were published in 2011 and 2012. 

Over the years, he has translated twenty-four books (including The Anonymous Novel (Vagabond Voices 2016)), and his two collections of poetry, Presbyopia and A Barrel of Dried Leaves, were published in 2009 and 2016. Giving the lie to rumours of a drunken demise shortly after completing a book translation (Cinico: Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum), he continues to live in Glasgow and is reputedly in good health.

Gary Duncan

Gary Duncan was born in Northumberland in 1967. He is a freelance writer and editor, and has worked in Hong Kong, Milan, and Brussels. He is the founder and former editor Spelk, the flash fiction magazine, and his stories have appeared online and in print. Vagabond Voices published You're Not Supposed to Cry, a collection of Gary's flash fiction, in 2017.

Jenni Daiches

Jenni Daiches was born in the USA, educated in the US and England, and has lived and worked in Scotland since 1971. She was with the National Museum of Scotland in various capacities (including Head of Publications and script co-ordinator for the Museum of Scotland exhibitions which opened in 1998) from 1978 to 2001. Both before and since she has worked as a freelance writer and lecturer. Daiches, who also writes under the name Jenni Calder, is the author of innumerable literary and non-fiction works, including her recent novel Borrowed Time (Vagabond Voices, 2016).

Chris Dolan

Chris Dolan writes for page, stage and screen. An early short story won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Competition, and Poor Angels and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award in 1995. A second collection of stories, Hour After Hour, was published in 2008. Other stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio. His first novel, Ascension Day, won the McKitterick Prize. His non-fiction books include An Anarchist’s Story: The Life of Ethel Macdonald and John Lennon: The Original Beatle. He broadcasts regularly on TV and radio.

Winner of an Edinburgh Fringe First, he has written several plays, performed internationally, including the only stage adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Dolan has written extensively for radio and television, both drama and documentary, including An Anarchist’s Story, and a history of poor whites in the Caribbean, Barbado’ed (both BBC). He is also a published poet, a columnist, and teacher.

Vagabond Voices published Dolan's first crime novel, Potter’s Field, on 22 September 2014. This has the pace of the crime genre, but retains Dolan’s love of language and sharp observation of human behaviour. His other works published by Vagabond include Redlegs and Aliyyah.

Vicki Husband

Vicki Husband completed a first degree in Fine Art and trained as an Occupational Therapist. She works for the NHS. In 2010, she graduated from Glasgow University with an MLitt in Creative Writing. She gained a place on the celebrated Clydebuilt poetry apprenticeship scheme in 2012, where she was mentored by the late Alexander Hutchison. She has had poems published in Mslexia, The Rialto, Gutter, Magma, The Missing Slate and Northwords Now. Her poetry has won awards in the Mslexia Poetry Competition and the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Prize, while she was a runner-up in the Pighog/Poetry School pamphlet award in 2013. In 2016 Vagabond Voices published Husband's first poetry collection, This Far Back Everything Shimmers, which was Saltire-shortlisted for Best Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. vickihusband.wordpress.com

Peter Arnott

Born in Glasgow in 1962, Peter Arnott began his career as a playwright in Scotland in May 1985 with the simultaneous premieres of The Boxer Benny Lynch and White Rose. Forty-something plays later, he has won the TMA (2003), Creative Scotland (2007) and Fringe First (2012) awards. He has been writer-in-residence at the Traverse, the Tron and the National Library of Scotland. His plays have been performed in London, Moscow, Melbourne and New York. Vagabond Voices published his first novel, Moon Country, in 2015, and a double bill of his popular plays Face and Shall Roger Casement Hang? in 2016.

Lars Sund

Born in 1953, Lars Sund is a Finnish writer from the Swedish-speaking border town of Jakobstad, and his eight novels have all been written in Swedish. His last five novels have been translated into Finnish, and A Happy Little Island (En lycklig liten ö, 2007) is his first book to be translated into English. In 2007, Claes Olsson made a film called Colorado Avenue, based on Sund’s books Colorado Avenue and Lanthandlerskans son.

Colorado Avenue won two prestigious prizes for Finnish literary fiction: the Runeberg in 1992 and the Kiitos kirjasta-mitali (Thanks-for-the-Book Award) in 1993. Lanthandlerskans son took the Lars Widding Award in 1998, while Sund was nominated for the Finlandia Prize in 1997.

Lars Sund, who studied English, Swedish and comparative literature at the Åbo Akademi, the only exclusively Swedish-language university in Finland, now resides in Uppsala, Sweden.

Theresa Muñoz

Theresa Muñoz was born in Vancouver and lives in Edinburgh. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow, where she was Overseas Research Scholar and wrote the first doctoral thesis on the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard. Her work has appeared in several journals in both Canada and the United Kingdom, including Canadian Literature, The Poetry Review and Best Scottish Poems. She has been shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and has been a prizewinner in the McLellan and Troubadour competitions. She is a regular contributor to the Scottish Review of Books and the Herald’s book pages, and is the author of the pamphlet Close (HappenStance Press, 2012). She works as a university tutor and a researcher in digital poetics and Scotlit. www.theresamunoz.com

Alessandro Barbero

Born in Turin in 1959, Alessandro Barbero teaches medieval history and military history at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli. He is the author of four novels, one of which won the Premio Strega (roughly the Italian equivalent of the Booker) in 1996.

Vagabond Voices commissioned the translation of his second title, The Anonymous Novel. It is the view of many Italian critics that this is the best of his works, and should have long since been published in English. In 2005, the Republic of France awarded Barbero with the title of Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He continues to publish historical and fiction works faster than this website can keep up with.

Mari Saat

Born in Tallinn in 1947, Mari Saat is an Estonian economist and writer who has published four novels plus a number of short story collections, children’s books and non-fiction works. She has received many awards since releasing her first collection of short stories (Katastroof) in 1973, including the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Prose Award in 1992, 1999 and 2008 – the latter for her novel Lasnamäe lunastaja (The Saviour of Lasnamäe), which has now been translated into English by Vagabond Voices. Saat is known for her sharp social analyses and existential explorations. She teaches business ethics at the Tallinn University of Technology.

Her books have been translated into several languages, and The Saviour of Lasnamäe into Russian and Finnish.

Jim Sillars

Jim Sillars, born in 1937, followed his father into work on the railways before joining the Royal Navy as a radio operator. When he later joined the Fire Brigade, he started his political career, active in the Fire Brigades Union and the Scottish Trade Union Congress. He became the Labour MP for South Ayrshire in 1970 and worked tirelessly for the establishment of a Scottish Assembly. He split from the Labour Party in 1976 to help form the Scottish Labour Party (SLP). Having lost his seat in 1979, he worked in South East Asia before returning to Westminster in the Govan by-election as an SNP MP. The Govan seat was lost in 1992, and he worked for as Assistant General Secretary at the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce in London, promoting trade and advising Arab governments on economic development and preparation for joining the World Trade Organisation. Sillars continues to write a column for Holyrood Magazine and occasional articles for various newspapers. He was married to the independent MSP Margo MacDonald, who died in 2014, and is an articulate spokesman for the cause of socialism and independence.

Harry Giles

Orcadian writer and performer Harry Giles lives in Edinburgh. Founder of Inky Fingers Spoken Word and co-director of live art platform ANATOMY, he has published two pamphlets, Visa Wedding and Oam: Poems fae Govanhill Baths; was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion; and won the 2012 IdeasTAP national poetry competition. Appearances at Forest Fringe, Buzzcut, NTI (Latvia), Bunker (Slovenia), and CrisisArt (Italy). The Guardian picked his performance What We Owe in their best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup.

Since publishing his poetry sequence "Drone" with Vagabond Voices (as part of Our Real Red Selves) in 2015 Giles has continued to create compelling and award-winning works. For more on his projects please visit harrygiles.org. 

Marion McCready

Marion McCready lives in Dunoon, Argyll. Her poems have been published in many magazines including Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Salzburg Review and The Glasgow Herald. Her pamphlet, Vintage Sea, was published in 2011. In the same year, she won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013, which included nine months' mentoring by Vicki Feaver. Her first full-length collection, Tree Language, was published by Eyewear Publishing in 2014. Since publishing her poetry sequence "The Birth Garden" as part of Vagabond's Our Real Red Selves in 2015, McCready has stayed busy: her second full-length collection, Madame Ecosse (Eyewear Publishing), is due out in Spring 2017. sorlily.blogspot.co.uk

J.L. Williams

J.L. Williams was born in New Jersey and studied Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She moved to Edinburgh in 2001. She has collaborated with artists, musicians and film-makers. She was awarded an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary, enabling her to journey to the Aeolian Isles to write Condition of Fire (Shearsman Books, 2011). Her second collection, Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), explores the idea of home and where we come from. J.L. Williams performs in the band Opul. jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk

Lewis Gordon

Lewis Gordon was born in 1983. After completing a music degree he worked as a postman and music instructor before becoming a session musician. He has performed and recorded widely, working with major artists including Codeine Velvet Club, Jon Fratelli and Texas. Since 2011 he has played bass guitar with Deacon Blue. 2011 was also the year he began writing fiction, inspired by a course at Glasgow University’s Centre for Open Studies. There he was galvanised by an energetic collective of writers and became involved with new fiction quarterly thi wurd, where an early short story was published. He was born, raised and lives in the southside of Glasgow. Sheep and Goats is his first novel. www.lewis-gordon.com

Allan Massie

Allan Massie is the author of twenty novels and a dozen non-fiction books. His six novels about the Roman Empire have been widely translated, and have been particularly successful in Brazil. Gore Vidal has defined him as a “master of the long-ago historical novel”. His twentieth century novels have been compared by French critics to Balzac and Stendhal, by Muriel Spark to Thomas Mann, and by others to Evelyn Waugh. He thinks such comparisons as pleasing as they are ridiculously exaggerated. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and has been given an honorary doctorate by Strathclyde University.

Magnus Florin

Magnus Florin, born in Uppsala in 1955, was first published in 1989 with The Narrative Flow. The Garden was published in 1995 and brought him unexpected success. The German version came out as recently as 2013 and once again attracted a great deal of critical attention. It is his first work to be published in English (Vagabond Voices, 2014). He has written poetry, short prose works and four other novels. He has also worked as a librettist. An opera staged at the Drottningholm Theatre in 1999 was based on The Garden. He has worked on dramatisations, including Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for Swedish Radio in 2009.

Vagabond Voices has since published a translation of a second novel by Florin, Siblings, in 2021.

Gregory Norminton

Gregory Norminton was born in Berkshire in 1976, of Franco-Belgo-Irish parentage. He was educated at Wellington College and studied English at Oxford University, before studying drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. The “profession” of actor allowed him to devote his entire time to writing and his first novel, The Ship of Fools, was published by Sceptre in 2002. It was followed in 2004 by Arts and Wonders, for which he was awarded an Arts Council Writers Award. Following a brief spell in the American Midwest, he wrote a third novel, Ghost Portrait, which was published in 2005, when he also took part in a conservation-themed television series, Planet Action, which was filmed in Panama, Belize, Malaysia and Cambodia.

Gregory Norminton moved to Edinburgh in 2007, where he finished a fourth novel, Serious Things, which was published to great acclaim and derisory sales in 2008. In 2010 he married the dedicatee of this book of aphorisms. In 2011 he took up a lectureship in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as writing novels, Gregory Norminton has translated Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, published short stories, written plays for radio and appeared several times on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. He recently edited a collection of original fiction by major UK authors, Out of Chaos – stories for our shared planet, which was published by Oneworld in 2013. Vagabond Voices published his collection of short stories, Thumbnails, in 2013.

Les Wilson

Les Wilson is a writer, journalist and award-winning documentary film-maker. His university was an early career in regional and evening newspapers, and an overland journey to India. He became an on-screen reporter on Scottish Television’s nightly news programme and later the editor of the channel’s political programme, Ways and Means. It was in this role that he witnessed the vote of confidence that brought down Callaghan’s government and led to the Thatcher one in 1979. Although his work has taken him to six continents and challenging locations like Chernobyl and Southern Sudan, he still believes that night in Westminster to have been the most remarkable scene he has ever witnessed.

As a documentary-maker, he has directed several films and his “political” documentaries include The Englishing of Scotland, Independence Day and, in Gaelic, Diomhair (Secret). He is the co-author of Scotland’s War, based on a 30-part documentary series he directed. Fire in the Head is his first published novel.

Ermanno Cavazzoni

Ermanno Cavazzoni is one of Italy’s most original writers. He is also a reasonably prolific one whose works have been translated in many European languages. This is the second of his books to be translated into English, and readers are unlikely to find anything quite like it on the shelves (nearly) full of dreary sameness in our bookshops. They would do well to give it a try and enter into its fantastic spirit of the absurd best described as a vibrant literary grotesque in the Italian tradition.

Ermanno Cavazzoni’s first novel was made into Fellini’s last film, The Voice of the Moon.

Luciano Mecacci

Luciano Mecacci (born 1946) is professor of psychology at Florence University, and has written widely in his field, although his particular expertise is psychophysiology and the history of psychology. He has worked in Russia and France, and his books have been translated into English, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and German. In 2000 he recieved the Minguzzi Prize for his contribution to psychology, and in 2005 he received an honorary degree from Lima University.