Kirstin Innes

The skipping and the turning comes naturally now because you've danced this dance twice a week every December since you were eight. It lies there in you, seeps back through your skin at the weirdest times, usually at weddings. Autopilot. At Sarah Irvine's, her new English husband's sister will ask you to show her the dances by way of asking you to sleep with her, and you'll grin and explain her through the Gay Gordons, hamming up the accent, saying that ach, it was practically whipped into you at school, this is the closest to a race memory that oor generation's got and you'll laugh, pull her close for the polKA polKA polKA.

From Dance Me In

Biography

Kirstin Innes was born in Edinburgh. She attended Aberdeen University, where she studied Creative Writing with Professor Alan Spence and gained a First Class degree in Scottish Literature graduating with the Lucy Prize, the Senatus Prize, and the Walter Keir Memorial Award for Best Dissertation. She also has an MLitt from Aberdeen University; her thesis was on autobiography and fiction in the work of Muriel Spark.

On leaving academia, Kirstin worked as a freelance journalist, a waitress, a secretary, a theatre costume designer, an envelope stuffer and a press officer, and then spent two years as Press and Publicity Manager of the Arches theatre, club, gallery and gig venue in Glasgow, where she still lives. She has been a full time member of the editorial staff of The List magazine since 2006, writing on theatre, literature, rock music, travel, fashion and visual art. She also writes literary criticism: her article ‘Mark Renton's Bairns', on the post-Trainspotting literary landscape in Scotland, was published in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) She was recently commissioned to write a short play for the Arches' Scratch Night and regularly reads short stories at performance literature nights in Glasgow.

She's currently working on her first novel, provisionally titled Dance Me In, which looks at memory, coincidence and nostalgia in a small country, and opens in an enforced country dancing class in a Scottish school in the early 1990s

To visit Kirstin's MySpace page click here.

Comment  

"Winning this award is a very, very big deal for me. It's bought me time to write in, and I'm  hugely excited about the other opportunities involved, too."