17th November 2026
Margaret Elphinstone will be reading from her novel Lost People (shortlisted for the 2024 Saltire Award) which focuses on hope and renewal in an unspecified world of trauma and devastation. She will discuss themes of exile, displacement, and strange journeys within the context of the devastation and slow recovery of the natural world with which human lives are inextricably entwined. Her talk will conclude with two poems addressing similar themes from her 2026 poetry collection Time Seeds.
Biography
Born in Kent and educated in London and Durham, author Professor Margaret Elphinstone has lived and worked in Scotland all her adult life. She has lived in Shetland, Galloway and Edinburgh, and now lives and works in Galloway. Her first short stories were published in 1983, when she was working as a gardener (and has written two books on organic gardening). Elphinstone is Emerita Professor of Writing at Strathclyde University.
The Sea Road (2000) won the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award for 2001, and was listed as one of the ‘100 Best Scottish Books of All Time’ by The List magazine. A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring re-telling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. The Gathering Night (2009) is a compelling family drama of love and loss, set deep in our stone age past, but which resonates as a parable for our troubled planet 8,000 years on. Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when one of her brothers goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son.
Margaret says new writing has come to her unexpectedly. After The Gathering Night, Margaret didn’t publish a book for fifteen years. She wrote poetry, occasional stories and articles, generally about connection, or lack of connection, between human and other lives. “The culture in which I grew up is, as expected, fragmenting….. My generation has failed to turn back the tide. If anyone can bring healing out of this, it will be people younger than me who already confront the equivocal future with hope and courage. But I couldn’t just stand back. Words are powerful: they change the way we see the world. I no longer felt part of any literary scene, but I had to say something.” Lost People emerged from this background. Margaret’s new collection of writing Time Seeds (2026) adopts the brevity and immediacy of poetry, to articulate the urgency and perils of our times.
