James McGonigal

Born in Dumfries in 1947, and brought up there and in Glasgow, James McGonigal taught English for fourteen years in secondary schools before working in colleges, and then until retirement as Professor of English in Education at the University of Glasgow. He combined teaching and creative writing with publications and research in special educational needs, Scottish and Irish literature, and literary modernism, and is associate editor of the SCROLL series (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) published by Dutch-American publishers, Rodopi. He has published poetry and prose for adults and children (in both English and Scots language), and co-edited several anthologies of contemporary writing in the New Writing Scotland series in the 1990s. McGonigal has published six collections of poetry, including the tri-lingual long poem in English, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Passage/An Pasaíste, (Mariscat, 2004). His poetry has won literary prizes in Scotland and Ireland, including the Michael Marks Poetry Award for Cloud Pibroch (Mariscat Press, 2010). Mariscat published Turning Over in a Strange Bed in 2017.
A friend of Edwin Morgan, McGonigal is currently Chair of the Edwin Morgan Trust. His biography of Morgan, Beyond the Last Dragon, appeared from Sandstone Press in 2010. McGonigal also co-edited Morgan’s letters: The Midnight Letterbox: selected correspondence 1950-2010 was published by Carcanet Press in 2015, followed by Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language: A New Prose Collection 1950-2005 (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Glasgow, 2020)