Hugh McMillan

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 ten 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 2021 the poetry collections Whit if and Haphazardly in the Starless Night 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. In 2020 he was chosen as a ‘Poetry Ambassador’ for the Scottish Poetry Library and in 2022 edited their ‘Best Scottish Poems’ anthology. He has also edited anthologies highlighting two important Dumfries and Galloway writers, Josephine and William Neill.