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New writer 2024: Pip Osmond-Williams

Poetry

Pip Osmond-Williams is a poet and researcher originally from north-west England and now living in Perth. Her poems have been published in Gutter, Poetry Scotland, Northwords Now, From Glasgow to Saturn, and Channel, and have been anthologised in New Writing Scotland (ASLS, 2019) and Island and Sea (Scottish Writers’ Centre, 2020). In 2020 she was shortlisted for Wigtown Festival’s Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize and the following year won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize for her debut pamphlet Of Algae & Grief, which was selected as Poetry Book Society’s Spring Pamphlet Choice in 2022.

In 2019 Pip was awarded a PhD from the University of Glasgow for her thesis ‘Changing Scotland: The social history of love in the life and work of Edwin Morgan’. She is co-editor of The Collected Published Poetry of William Soutar (Tippermuir, 2024) and co-edits the online magazine The Bottle Imp.

Writing sample

Poem 'Migration' that reads: That first summer, we mistook their bodies for shrapnel. The second, their wings for a shiv. We lost faith in flight, forgot to seek hope in the shape of a bird, calling our names from the prayer wall to the west coast swift and fleeting We let slip what it’s like to come home again, somehow fear it. A test, of course – that year, the earth bound our bodies quietly to its own we did not feel it but salt blood became seafoam murmuring wet lines of swell and retreat the windows were open something returned, brown-bellied, in a frenzy and drift it looked like survival or celestial cue it sounded like wings drumming in the north of the house

Pip says:

'I'm delighted to receive a New Writers Award – it's a real honour and I'm immensely grateful to Scottish Book Trust for giving me the opportunity to focus on and develop my work, as well as to connect with the wider poetry community.'