Sheena Blackhall
Sheena Blackhall was born Sheena Booth Middleton in Aberdeen in 1947. She was educated in Aberdeen, attending the College of Education to qualify as a primary school teacher. She took an Honours degree in psychology with the Open University, graduating in 1995, and gained an M.Litt with distinction from Aberdeen University in 2000. To date she has published some 174 poetry pamphlets in Scots & English, 4 novellas, and 15 collections of short stories, both online & in book form, meaning she is probably Scotland’s most prolific poet. In 2018 Aberdeen University gave her the honorary degree of Master of the University.
From 1998 to 2003 she was Creative Writing Fellow in Scots at Aberdeen University’s Elphinstone Institute, and in 2007 she was Creative Writing Tutor at the Institute for Irish and Scottish studies. With Les Wheeler she co-edits The Elphinstone Kist, a Doric website with downloadable resources. In 2016 she became an Honorary Fellow of the WordCentre for Creative Writing at Aberdeen University.
In 2021 she published A Bard’s Life, an autobiography in which she revealed details of an attack on her by a survivor of the Aberdeen double-murderer, James Oliphant, and discussing the consequences of the subsequent trauma that she faced.
She is a noted singer of traditional ballads, and has translated into Doric stories such as The Wizard of Oz, Julia Donaldson‘s The Grufallo and, with Sheila Templeton, Jane Ayre.