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, 'What a writer's archive can tell us about disability and death', 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 We intend to map the Soutar archive at the NLS in more detail and examine unpublished material such as dreambooks, chapbooks, letters and journals to explore Soutar’s reflections on physical isolation and terminal illness, his family’s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. The project’s main outputs will be an introduction to volume 2 of William Soutar: The Collected Works, and poetry workshops held at the Soutar House in Perth. 

← back to Network Writers