Tracing the Shoreline

Within this year’s festival theme, The Space Between, we’re exploring shorelines, their significance, power and the threat posed by climate crisis to our coastlines as we know them.

Garry Mackenzie will join us with Firth, a collection which reaches back into the deep geological past and forward into a troubled future of pollution and extinction. At the heart of Firth are poems following the boom and bust of the nineteenth century fishing industry and the ecological parable it presents.

Alongside him, Alycia Pirmohamed will read poems from her upcoming collection, as well as discussing her memoir, Shorelines: Memory, Migration and the Selves We Become, which moves from lavender skies to lighthouses, from surefooted ideas to liminal spaces.

Chaired through the ConVERSE Emerging Chairs Programme with the University of Edinburgh