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  • Jim Carruth
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Jim Carruth

b.1963

POEMS LISTEN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up on his parents’ dairy farm. After spending a period in Turkey he returned to live in Renfrewshire. He is one of the founders and current chair of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, a network of Glasgow-based poets, and has been an artistic advisor for StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. In 2014, he became Glasgow’s Poet Laureate.

Carruth was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2009 and has been the winner of the James McCash poetry competition, the McLellan Poetry Prize and the Callum Macdonald prize.

His first pamphlet, Bovine Pastoral, came out in 2004 and was followed by seven further chapbooks and three book length collections. Killochries, a verse novella, tracking the relationship of two very different men working a remote sheep farm, was published in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, the Seamus Heaney Centre For Poetry Prize and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize for first collection. Black Cart and Bale Fire are the first two parts of the Auchensale Trilogy, exploring the changing rural landscape. He is currently working on the third book, Far Field.

Read more

Read the poems

  • the long bench
  • Earthstruck
  • Bereavement Counselling from Murdoch of Blackbyres
  • from vii. flock master
  • The Moleman’s Apprentice
  • Farm Sale
  • The Big Mistake
  • Herd

Listen

Selected Bibliography

Bovine Pastoral (Ludovic Press, 2004)
High Auchensale (Ludovic Press, 2006)
Cowpit Yowe (Ludovic Press, 2008)
Baxter’s Old Ram Sang the Blues (Ludovic Press, 2008)
Grace Notes 1959 (Dreadful Night Press, 2010)
Working the Hill  (Mariscat, 2011)
Rider at the Crossing (Happenstance, 2012)
Prodigal (Mariscat Press, 2014)
Killochries (Freight Books, 2015, reprinted Polygon 2018)
Migration (Vagabond Voices, 2016)
Black Cart (Freight Books, 2017 reprinted Polygon 2019)
Bale Fire (Polygon 2019)

Further Information

Jim Carruth’s website

Jim reading his poems on Poetry Archive

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about Jim Carruth
Publications by Jim Carruth

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