WILLIAM IMRAY grew up in a home where Scots was the spoken language. His mother’s father was the chief male influence, a monumental mason in wood and stone, a designer of gravestones, whose enthusiasm for Robert Burns gave William from an early age encouragement to learn, recite and perform Burns’s poems and songs. He later learned a number of languages, concentrating his delight in their poetry and song traditions across centuries, and carried into his teaching of Greek and Latin a predilection for the ancient classics which is even less fashionable or acceptable in the 21st century than it was in the 20th century, when he was teaching. He took early retirement when the writing of poetry in Scots and English was beginning to occupy his attention more eagerly than the teaching which was his profession. His poems were published in Lines Review, Orbis, Outposts, Prospice, the Aberdeen Free Press and Journal and Leopard Magazine, and his first published book of poems, Fool’s Cycle, appeared in 1989.

ALAN RIACH (b.1957) Poet and Professor of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University. Born Airdrie, Lanarkshire, studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow, worked at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, 1986-2000, returning to Scotland 2001. Books include poetry: The Winter Book (2017), Homecoming (2009), Wild Blue: Selected Poems (2014), The MacDiarmid Memorandum (2023); criticism: Representing Scotland (2005), Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (1991), and co-authored with Alexander Moffat, Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2008), described in the TLS as ‘a landmark book’. Luath Press also publish his 734-page Scottish Literature: An Introduction (2022), described in The Times as ‘magisterial’.

WILLIAM IMRAY grew up in a home where Scots was the spoken language. His mother’s father was the chief male influence, a monumental mason in wood and stone, a designer of gravestones, whose enthusiasm for Robert Burns gave William from an early age encouragement to learn, recite and perform Burns’s poems and songs. He later learned a number of languages, concentrating his delight in their poetry and song traditions across centuries, and carried into his teaching of Greek and Latin a predilection for the ancient classics which is even less fashionable or acceptable in the 21st century than it was in the 20th century, when he was teaching. He took early retirement when the writing of poetry in Scots and English was beginning to occupy his attention more eagerly than the teaching which was his profession. His poems were published in Lines Review, Orbis, Outposts, Prospice, the Aberdeen Free Press and Journal and Leopard Magazine, and his first published book of poems, Fool’s Cycle, appeared in 1989.

ALAN RIACH (b.1957) Poet and Professor of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University. Born Airdrie, Lanarkshire, studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow, worked at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, 1986-2000, returning to Scotland 2001. Books include poetry: The Winter Book (2017), Homecoming (2009), Wild Blue: Selected Poems (2014), The MacDiarmid Memorandum (2023); criticism: Representing Scotland (2005), Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (1991), and co-authored with Alexander Moffat, Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2008), described in the TLS as ‘a landmark book’. Luath Press also publish his 734-page Scottish Literature: An Introduction (2022), described in The Times as ‘magisterial’.