Kirsten Norrie

Kirsten Norrie is an award-winning musician, writer and artist who publishes poetry and performs music under her matrilineal name, MacGillivray. An AHRC Kluge Scholar at the Library of Congress; 2019 Fondation Jan Michalski writer in residence and Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University 2024-5, she has been the recipient of numerous Creative Scotland awards. Her poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books and taught on the Scottish SQA curriculum. In 2019, she won a Paul Hamlyn Composer Award for a body of work and her music has featured in several film soundtracks for British director, Andrew Kötting. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and The Verb, and favourably reviewed in press including the Guardian, the TLS, the Quietus and the Scotsman. Kirsten holds an AHRC-funded DPhil from Oxford University and has written four poetry collections and two pamphlets: The Last Wolf of Scotland (Red Hen Press 2013); The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless, (Bloodaxe Books 2016); The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019); Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire (Bloodaxe Books, 2023); The Demon Tracts (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and Until the Twilight Fails (Dare Gale Press, 2026). She is the author of non-fiction books Scottish Lost Boys (Strange Attractor Press, 2027) and Eagle Song (Wilton Square Books, 2028), and novel An American Book of the Dead (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). A permanent MacGillivray archive is held at the Scottish Poetry Library. www.kirstennorrie.com