Hadfield gets fellowship

ISLES-BASED poet Jen Hadfield has been appointed as the 2014 Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow and says she will use it to “research and write about who and what washes up in Shetland”.

She will undertake her fellowship in partnership with creative writing centre Moniack Mhor, which lies three miles from Loch Ness overlooking the mountains of Strathfarrar and Ben Wyvis, Inverness-shire.

Hadfield, who won the 2008 TS Eliot Prize, is proposing to work in either poetic or short story form using the idea of flotsam and jetsam to explore themes of place and identity.

She said she was “really grateful” of the appointment, which she described as “a responsibility, and a privilege, and a heart-leap”.

“I want to use the fellowship to research and write about who and what washes up in Shetland, as well as to ask folk – Shetlanders and incomers – what they make of this place and of their relationship to the rest of the world.”

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She said Dr Wallace had been “immensely supportive to me in the past”, and thanked his family, along with Creative Scotland and Moniack Mhor, for the oppourtinty to “read and write and travel and learn”.

The residency, beginning in December, will offer Hadfield the opportunity to receive mentoring, attend courses, lead workshops and use the writing centre as a retreat space.

Moniack Mhor director Rachel Humphries said Hadfield’s ideas were “outstanding” and her project created “an evocative sense of the themes”, adding: “Her writing is both imaginative and intuitive and we are delighted to be able to support her over the next year. I’m sure that with Jen’s talent and professionalism she will create a work of beauty.”

Jenny Niven of Creative Scotland said the marriage of Hadfield’s “beautiful poetry, as rooted in Scotland’s landscape as it is, and Moniack Mhor, among the most inviting and inspiring of residency opportunities anywhere, is a wonderful pairing”.

• Jen Hadfield’s third poetry collection ‘Byssus’ was published in February. You can read more about her at rogueseeds.blogspot.co.uk and scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/jen-hadfield.