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 is the artistic adviser 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 collection, Bovine Pastoral, came out in 2004 and has been 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 a trilogy of books exploring the changing rural landscape.