Margaret Tait (1918–1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. ’In a documentary’, she wrote, real things ’lose their reality… and there’s no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.’ If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen.
Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, draws on Tait’s three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait’s writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.
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Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and went on to study at the University of Aberdeen, and then Newnham College, Cambridge. She taught at the University of Strathclyde before becoming a full-time writer. She has received much critical acclaim for her work: Smith’s first publication, a short story collection entitled Free Love and Other Stories (1995), won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; her 2001 novel, Hotel World, was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction; and her third novel, The Accidental, won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. She now writes for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the Times Literary Supplement.