Please join us to celebrate the launch of Fower Pessoas by Colin Bramwell. The reading will be hosted by Scottish Makar Peter Mackay. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nCHoh0RWS5W1HHT9CDbKIw#/registration

Fower Pessoas is the most original work of translation that you will read this year: a bold reimagining of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry by an exciting next-generation Scottish poet. Following his subject’s unique approach to composition, Colin Bramwell puts all four of Pessoa’s heteronyms into a present-day Scots-language vernacular, and so creates a parochial Pessoa for our own times.

Bramwell’s adaptation matches his subject’s restless lyricism. It is rare to see a translator go toe-to-toe with their subject in this way. The resulting entanglement makes for some astonishing, full-throated poetry.

Readers will be delighted by this witty, emotive and artful reinterpretation of an indispensable European poet. Fower Pessoas not only celebrates Pessoa’s extraordinary range of modes and moods, but also marks the arrival of an outstanding new talent in Scottish poetry.

About the speakers:

Colin Bramwell grew up on the Black Isle and lives in Edinburgh. He studied literature at Edinburgh, McGill, Oxford and St Andrews. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Irish Pages, The London Magazine, PN Review, Magma, The Rialto, New Writing Scotland, Interpret, Poetry Scotland and The Scotsman. Colin’s first as-yet unpublished poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize; his translations of the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu won the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition; his translation of Ko-Hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was shortlisted for the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. His most recent book is Aonghas Macneacail’s beyond (co-edited with Gerda Stevenson, Shearsman 2024). Colin is a member of the Southbank New Poets Collective, and holds a doctorate in creative writing from St Andrews.

Peter Mackay is a poet, broadcaster, translator and lecturer. He has two collections with Acair – Galore (2015) and Some Kind of (2020) – and a pamphlet, From another island (2010), with Clutag Press. Originally from the Isle of Lewis, he lives in Edinburgh and works in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. In 2024 he was appointed Scottish Makar.