The Edwin Morgan Centenary programme was created to celebrate Edwin Morgan’s work and disseminate it as widely as possible. While the impact of the Covid19 pandemic has changed so much about the world in the last month, it hasn’t altered the Edwin Morgan Trust’s intention to pay a fitting tribute to Scotland’s much-loved, much-missed Makar in his centenary year.
In response to the current situation, the Trust is re-imagining and expanding on their physical programme to generate new spaces to celebrate and share Edwin Morgan’s work online. A new online video channel, Hold Hands Among the Atoms (the title taken from the cycle of seventy ‘social poems’ Morgan wrote for his 70th birthday in 1990), will feature elements of the programme originally planned for the public programme of #EdwinMorgan100, alongside new material created especially for this medium. Launching on Monday 27th April, which would have been Morgan’s 100th birthday, the channel will bring together diverse voices and perspectives from across the globe to celebrate the work and life of Edwin Morgan.
The channel (and centenary) will launch with a short film, ‘Open The Doors!’ (title taken from Morgan’s poem ‘For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004’), which features contributions from Morgan’s friends, collaborators and celebrity fans including Liz Lochhead, Alan Cumming, Jackie Kay, Kate Dickie, Damian Barr, Andy Arnold, Ron Butlin, Carol Ann Duffy, Gerry Mulgrew, Tommy Smith and Imtiaz Dharker, sharing their memories of Morgan and reading his work.
Readers from around the world are invited to share their favourite Morgan poems on social media on Monday 27th April, across video, text or any other medium they find appropriate, using the hashtags #edwinmorgan100 and #holdhandsamongtheatoms. A series of “birthday cards” designed for social media and featuring some of his best-loved works are available to download HERE.
Edwin Morgan Trust 