Stuart A. Paterson

Stuart is an acclaimed, award-winning poet and performer of his work in English and Scots.  From 2017-18 he was BBC Scotland’s Poet in Residence. Raised and educated in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, he has held many writing residences and has extensive experience of working in the areas of family outreach, housing/homeless support and residential childcare. Author of several collections and widely published, anthologised and filmed worldwide, he received an Eric Gregory Award from the UK Society of Authors in 1992 and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014. Stuart has a proven track record of initiating and encouraging engagement in creative writing in many sectors of the community – primary and secondary schools, libraries, progressing writers, mental health and wellbeing, the elderly and in the area of Scots language. Since 2018, he’s been involved in large-scale community engagement with the Lowland Project, at The Stove in Dumfries, establishing the hugely successful High Street Writers and continuously engaging with the wider non-writing community to establish a ‘town centre regeneration narrative’. In summer 2019 he was a visiting lecturer and tutor in minority languages and poetry at Rhodes University and St. Andrew's College, Grahamstown, in South Africa.

(Photo credit: David Ho/Sandie Knudsen)