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 a degree in psychology with the Open University, graduating in 1995, and gained an M.Litt with distinction from Aberdeen University in 2000.
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.
Blackhall is a prolific writer, having published four Scots novellas, four Scots books for bairns, fifteen short story collections, and over one hundred poetry pamphlets, and has won many prizes for her work. Alan Spence edited and introduced her poems in The Space Between: new and selected poems (Aberdeen University Press, 2014). Many of her stories have been broadcast on Radio Scotland, two of her plays have been televised, and two of her short story collections are online.
In 2009 she became Makar (Poet Laureate) for Aberdeen and the North East.