Tim Tim Cheng will translate Our … in Heaven by Ka Yee Lee from Traditional Chinese to English. The poetry collection is based on the first line of The Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven”. The book focuses on a voice which interrogates, doubts, confesses, and complains to an unknown subject; and how such long interrogation will bring the voice back to itself. Ka Yee Lee is a Hong Kong-based poet and writer. Dr Colin Bramwell, an Edinburgh-based poet, translator, and scholar, will mentor Tim Tim Cheng on the craft of translation.

Mattea Gernentz is an art curator, PhD researcher, and writer based in Edinburgh. She has been selected as a Clydebuilt 16 Poet, Next Generation Young Makar, and Writer-in-Residence at Château de Sacy, Casa Regis, and Château de la Haute Borde. She has also been featured in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Dandelion Festival, and StAnza Festival. Mattea’s writing can be found in Gutter Magazine, Interpret, Gilded Dirt, Ekstasis Magazine, and beyond.

During the funding period, I will focus on submitting my first poetry pamphlet, ‘Dryad’, to competitions and relevant presses across the UK. This pamphlet explores the potent relationship between the body and landscape, deriving inspiration from an eclectic range of sources: queer Imagist H.D. (whom Ezra Pound dubbed ‘dryad’), the myth of Apollo and Daphne, lost saints, Scotland’s Women’s Timber Corps in the 1940s, and more. I will also create a new series of poems in conversation with the environment of the residency site where I am based, influenced by the work of Brigit Pegeen Kelly. In addition, I will take on the project of planning and editing my debut poetry collection.

Niall O’Gallagher is the author of three collections of poetry published by CLÀR, to be followed by a verse-novella, Litrichean Plàighe (‘Plague Letters’), in 2026. A novel in prose for children, Abigail agus na Seilleanan (‘Abigail and the Bees’), is in preparation. Fuaimean Gràidh / The Sounds of Love: Selected Poems was published by Francis Boutle in 2023. His English and Scots translations of longer Gaelic poems by Christopher Whyte are collected in Ceum air Cheum / Step by Step (Stornoway: Acair, 2019), while an anthology, Bàrdachd a’ Bhaile Mhòir: 15 Glasgow Poems, was published by Blue Diode in 2024.

My plan is to translate sonnets by Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), the author of remarkable, passionate love poems, directly from Portuguese into Gaelic verse. Born into a rural setting in the south east of the country, Florbela Espanca is nonetheless a poet of Lisbon, where she moved to study law and where her poems were published to simultaneous consternation and acclaim.
         I intend to translate ten of Florbela Espanca’s sonnets into Gaelic, respecting the form, rhyme and metre of the Portuguese originals. To paragraph Edwin Morgan’s introduction to his Scots translations of Mayakovsky in Wi the Haill Voice, the challenge is to see whether I can find in Gaelic the resources to match the energy, passion and musicality of Florbela Espanca’s sonnets,
expanding the range of my own Gaelic poetry in the process.
         No poems translated from Portuguese are included in Derick Thomson’s anthology of European poetry in Gaelic making this new territory for Gaelic writing beyond my own work. Having interviewed the poet about his concrete poetry, I know how important engaging with Lusophone poetry was for Edwin Morgan’s own development and so it’s very gratifying to have the Edwin Morgan Trust’s support with this work.

This generous support from the Open The Doors Fund will enable to me to take part in an interdisciplinary residency in Nuuk, Greenland. During my time in Greenland I will perform, take part in workshops, and lead one of my own. I will be utilising techniques developed during my time as the writer-in-residence for StAnza festival – supported by the Edwin Morgan Trust – responding to the residency’s theme of “warmth”. Over the past few years, I have established a practice of place and process, plotting journeys on the geolocation software what3words to create original visual and concrete poetry, exploring themes of psychogeography, mapping, pattern, and digital dislocation. I will be inviting participants to engage in the warmth of shared space and experience, and to consider the warmth generated by the data centres that store the traces of our digital habits, creating collaborative poetic maps. This support will allow me to develop this work in a setting where questions of language, place and sovereignty are especially present. I’m so grateful to get this opportunity to engage in international collaboration and exchange, reinforcing the importance of poetry as a space for dialogue, translation, and connection across borders. 

The funding will contribute towards a research trip to Latvia, where I will research the life of my maternal grandmother Biruta, who died a few years before I was born and whose lifespan coincided closely with the Soviet occupation of Latvia. The research will inform my manuscript-in-progress Organ Music, which engages with themes such as generational patterns, cultural&personal memory, expressions of womanhood and queerness under various regimes, and art making as decadence and/or a radical act. And swans. Integral to the manuscript is ekphrasis, so I will also be studying various Latvian artists of the period, for example, photographer Māra Brašmane, performance artist Andris Grinbergs, painter Maija Tabaka.

I will use this funding to research my third poetry collection, Human Ecology. The collection will concentrate on ways in which Scottish communities have imagined, exploited and depended upon natural resources through history, including forests, mining and renewables. My approach to the environment will be grounded in the material and social history of the country, and ask where we have been and where we are going in our interactions with the physical environment and other species. The core of the first section, on forests, will be based on research with foresters and woodland ecologists in the Scottish Highlands: interviewing them about their work, shadowing them, and learning about the history of forestry in northern Scotland, from Neolithic deforestation to the conifer plantations of the twentieth century. As this research will be most fruitful after establishing a rapport with people working with forests, I will be using the Open the Doors Fund award to cover travel, accommodation and childcare expenses for this in-person research over five days between August and October 2026. 

Sean’s Open the Doors Fund award will go towards a research trip to the National Archives in Kew, London, to spend time looking at and reading material related to the Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen public record as well as any other related non-digitised material which would otherwise remain inaccessible. This research will then be used to develop poetry which examines historic and contemporary responses to the record as well as where and how the record sits within wider narratives of government attitudes towards migration.