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Sheena Blackhall

b.1947

POEMS MULTIMEDIA BIBLIOGRAPHY CRITICISM

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.

Read more

Read the poems

  • Bawd bi the Dee
  • Lockdown in a Bedroom
  • Veesions frae a Heilan Burn, 1986
  • Drumneachie Ferm
  • Poem Inspired by a Gaelic Topography of Balquhidder Parish: Rev. Alex MacGregor, EUP 1886
  • Like T-Rex
  • And the washing still out drying
  • The Check-Oot Quine’s Lament
  • The time traivellers’ convention
  • Glen Muick
  • Spring in Cromar
  • Braes o Skene
  • View o Aiberdeen
  • Existentialist
  • November

Multimedia

Selected Bibliography

The Cyard’s Kist and other poems (Aberdeen: Rainbow Books, 1984)
Fite Doo Black Crow (Aberdeen: Keith Murray Publications, 1989)
Stagwyse: selected poems (Aberdeen: Charles Murray Memorial Trust, 1995)
The Singing Bird (Aberdeen: GKB Books/Elphinstone Institute, 2000)
Wittins (Callander: diehard publishers, 2010)
The space between: new and selected poems, edited by Alan Spence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2014)
A Bard’s Life (Rymour Books 2021)

For a complete listing of all Sheena Blackhall’s poetry publications, see her own blog website.

Selected Biography & Criticism

‘Sheena Blackhall’ in Gillean Somerville-Arjat and Rebecca E. Wilson (eds), Sleeping with Monsters: conversations with Scottish and Irish women poets (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990)

J. Derrick McClure, ‘The Doric continues to flourish’ in Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a poetic language from 1878 to the present (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000)

Further Information

Sheena Blackhall’s blog

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about Sheena Blackhall
Publications by Sheena Blackhall

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