James Aitchison

James Aitchison was born in Stirlingshire in 1938 and educated at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. He went on to publish several collections of poems and the critical study, The Golden Harvester: the vision of Edwin Muir and received a Gregory Award for the poems that formed the basis of his first collection, Sounds Before Sleep (1971), while in 1992 he won the Canadian Writing Wilderness award for the long poem, ‘Canada’, which appeared in Brain Scans (1998), the publication that began an interrogation into the nature of the mind, which remained a major subject within his poetics, along with an increasing interest in conservation and technology, often expressed with an anger at mankind’s failure to look after the world.

Formerly, a critic for The Scotsman and the Herald as well as a senior lecturer in the Department of Print Media, Publishing and Communication at Napier University, he wrote lucidly on the creative process and poetics, and his various publications include Cassell’s Dictionary of English Grammar, the textbook Writing for the Press: an introduction, and more recently, New Guide to Poetry and Poetics.