Pamela Beasant, Course Director

Pamela, originally from Glasgow, lives in Stromness, Orkney. She has been published widely as a poet and has written many information books for children. In 2006, her play, A Hamnavoe Man, was commissioned by and performed at the St Magnus Festival. Two further commissioned scripts were performed in 2007 and 2008. Her biographical study, Stanley Cursiter, a life of the artist was published in 2007, and she collaborated with composer Gemma McGregor on a children's musical, Voice, performed in 2008. A poetry collection, Running with a Snow Leopard, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2008. Pamela was the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow in 2007. She has read her work in Orkney, Shetland, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Brittany and Bratislava, and a new poetry book, Orkney: a celebration of light and landscape, with photographer Iain Sarjeant, was published in May 2010. Pamela is listed by the Scottish Book Trust, and has received writers' bursaries from Creative Scotland and Hi-Arts. From 2008-2010, she was the Scottish Poetry Library's Poet Partner in Orkney.

Jen Hadfield, Guest Tutor 2011

Jen lives in Shetland, where landscape and language persistently influence her poetry and visual art. Her work often pivots on the idea of the secular-sacred, relating to landscape – ‘It is in heaven as it is on earth', ‘it is on earth as it is in heaven'. Liturgical rhythms underpin many of her poems about place, home, ecology, space – an idiomatic mythology of the here-and-now. Of her two books published by Bloodaxe, Almanacs was written in Shetland and the Western Isles in 2002 thanks to a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council, and it won an Eric Gregory award in 2003. Nigh-no-Place, written in Canada and Shetland, was short-listed for the Forward Prize and won the T.S. Eliot prize for poetry in 2008. Jen is currently the Shetland Library's Reader-in-Residence*.

She blogs very intermittently, at rogueseeds.blogspot.com.

*Readers in Residence is part of Creative Scotland's Creative Futures programme promoting, connecting and developing Scotland's creative practitioners.
www.creativescotland.com/investment/creative-futures