Edwin Morgan wrote across forms, themes, and languages and supported other writers to find their voices; it is with this spirit that St Mungo’s Mirrorball designed the Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship Scheme. Founded in 2007, the scheme provides intensive support for poets at an early stage of their writing careers, encouraging a greater dialogue between them and more experienced practitioners.
The Clydebuilt scheme offers emerging poets the opportunity to receive mentoring from an experienced poet-tutor over the course of twelve months. Through a set of group tutorials and one-to-one sessions, participants are encouraged to develop not only their own writing style but their ability to critique others. Over the year the participants develop a portfolio of poems and, at the end of the twelve months, give a reading of a selection of their resulting work along with their tutor at a dedicated St Mungo’s Mirrorball event.
St Mungo’s Mirrorball is delighted to announce the mentor and mentees for Clydebuilt 15, funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust through The Second Life Awards 2022.
Mentor
Miriam Gamble is a poet and essayist from Northern Ireland. She has published three collections of poems with Bloodaxe Books: The Squirrels Are Dead (2010), Pirate Music (2014) and What Planet (2019). The Squirrels Are Dead won a Somerset Maugham Award; What Planet received the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize. Miriam lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh and has been working, most recently, on a volume of personal/lyric essays.
Mentees
Carlos Llaza (Arequipa, Peru) is a writer, translator and early career researcher. His pamphlets Brame el fuego and Naturaleza muerta con langosta, both in Spanish, were published in 2009 and 2018, respectively. His poems and translations have appeared in journals and magazines such as Burns Chronicle (Edinburgh), Circumference (New York), Estación Poesía (Seville), OcultaLit (Madrid), Letras Libres (Mexico City), or Periódico de Poesía (Mexico City), amongst others. He is currently finishing a PhD in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he also works as a tutor. His project focuses on translating a selection of Robert Burns’s poems and songs into Spanish, and researching the role literary translation has played in the reception of Burns and his work in Ibero-America. He lives in Plains, Airdrie.
Jacob O’Sullivan lives in Leith, Edinburgh, where he works in Museum Development and organises a regular ‘Poetry & Pints’ evening. He was born in Leicestershire and grew-up in Castletown, Isle of Man. His poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog, The North, Ram Eye Press and The Open Ear.
Rachel Rankin is a poet from Coatbridge, currently based in Leith. She received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2019 and a Dewar Arts Award in 2017. Rachel was shortlisted for the 2017 Jane Martin Poetry Prize and is currently shortlisted for the 2022 Aurora Prize for Writing. Her work has been published in Magma, Gutter, The Scotsman and Multiverse: An International Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, among others, and she has performed her work both nationally and internationally. Rachel also works as a translator from Norwegian and is currently pursuing a PhD which explores the feasibility of various approaches to poetry translation.
Stuart Rawlinson is a writer living in Glasgow, where he works as a software developer. Poems of his have been published by Gutter, SPAMzine, Fruit Journal, Pilot Press, and others. His micro-chapbook main args is available as part of the Ghost City Press 2021 Summer Series. He is currently working on a series of poems exploring the influences and languages of technology.
Edwin Morgan Trust 