Kirsteen McCue & Pip Osmond-Williams 

Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature & Song Culture at the University of Glasgow and Pip Osmond-Williams is a Scottish Literature researcher, editorial assistant and poet. They are currently working as co-editors, along with Dr Paul Philippou, on William Soutar: The Collected Works.

Our project centres on William Soutar (1898–1943), a Scottish poet and essayist who was bedridden at age 26 from ankylosing spondylitis and died at age 45. We have been editing (with Paul Philippou of Tippermuir Press in Perth) the first two volumes of a new Collected Works of Soutar, which include all of his published poetry, much of which speaks of the joy of life and the challenges of physical disability and death. Our intention is to further map the Soutar archive at the National Library of Scotland in more detail and examine unpublished material such as dreambooks, chapbooks, letters and journals to explore Soutar’s reflections on physical isolation and terminal illness, his family’s anticipatory grief, and the effect of his support network on his response to death and dying. In the meantime, our two volumes of Soutar's Published Poetry will appear in 2024 and we are already working on a third volume of unpublished poetry.  

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