Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was born in Glasgow. He served with the RAMC in the Middle East during World War II. He became lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, where he had studied, and retired as titular Professor in 1980. He was Glasgow’s first Poet Laureate and from 2004 until 2010 served as Scotland’s first Makar, or National Poet. He was made an OBE in 1982 and received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000. A Book of Lives (2007) won the Scottish Arts Council Sundial Book of the Year. Carcanet has published most of his work, including his Collected Poems, Collected Translations, plays such as A.D.: A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus Christ and The Play of Gilgamesh and his translations of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Racine’s Phaedra.

Hamish Whyte, poet, librarian, editor and publisher, lived for many years in Glasgow before moving to Edinburgh in 2004. His most recent collection of poems is Things We Never Knew (Shoestring, 2016). With Robert Crawford he edited About Edwin Morgan (EUP, 1990), which includes his checklist of Morgan’s publications; he edited Morgan’s Nothing Not Giving Messages (Polygon 1990) and contributed to The International Companion to Edwin Morgan (ASLS, 2015). He also runs Mariscat Press, which published many of Morgan’s works. His memoir, Morgan and Me, will be published by Happenstance Press in 2020.