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  • Hugh McMillan
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Hugh McMillan

b.1955

POEMS LISTEN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hugh McMillan is a poet from Penpont in South West Scotland. His work has been published widely in Scotland and beyond, and he has won various prizes, most recently the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award in 2017 for Sheep Penned, published by Roncadora; he won the same award in 2009 for Postcards from the Hedge. He has been a winner in the Smith/Doorstop Prize and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, and has also been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and the Basil Bunting Award.

He has had seven full poetry collections published, as well as numerous pamphlets. Not Actually Being in Dumfries: New and Selected poems was published by Luath Press in 2015, who also in 2016 brought out a book about his home region  commissioned by the Wigtown Book Festival, McMillan’s Galloway: an Unreliable Journey. In 2018  the poetry collections Heliopolis, and The Conversation of Sheep, the latter in collaboration with a local shepherd,  were also published by Luath. He has featured in many anthologies, and three times in the Scottish Poetry Library’s online selection Best Scottish Poems of the year. His poems have also been chosen three times to feature on National Poetry Day postcards, the latest in 2016. In 2017 he was writer in residence at the Harvard Summer School.

Read the poems

  • Dream
  • The Conversion of Sheep
  • Letter
  • The Spider’s Legend of Robert the Bruce
  • The X Files: Bonnybridge, October ’95
  • Fastness
  • A Very Small Miracle
  • Old Photograph
  • Lochinver

Listen

Selected Bibliography

Triumph of the Air (Newport: Envoi Poets, 1989)
Tramontana: poems (Glasgow: Dog & Bone, 1990)
Horridge (Edinburgh: Chapman Publishing, 1994)
Aphrodite’s Anorak (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 1996)
After the Storm (Huddersfield: Smith/Doorstop Books, 2005)
Strange Bamboo (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2007)
Postcards from the Hedge: a semi-detached tour of Scotland (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2008)
The Spider’s Spin On It: poems from Scottish history (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2009)
Willow Pattern (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2010)
The Lost Garden (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2010)
Cairn (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2011)
Thin Slice of Moon: new and selected poems (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2012)
The Other Creatures in the Wood (Edinburgh: Mariscat Press, 2014)
Not Actually Being in Dumfries: new and selected poems (Edinburgh: Luath, 2015)
Sheep Penned (Dumfries: Roncadora Press, 2017)

 

 

 

Further Information

Hugh McMillan’s website
Hugh McMillan’s blog

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about Hugh McMillan
Publications by Hugh McMillan

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Hugh McMillan

May 2011
Ryan chats with Dumfries poet Hugh McMillan, history teacher, National Trust for Scotland agitator and master of the entertaining poetry reading.
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