Wise, funny, cutting and honest, the poems collected in Second Wind seek to challenge false preconceptions about ageing and tackle a wide range of age-related themes including childhood memories, illness, retirement, absent friends and grandchildren.
About Douglas Dunn
Douglas is a major Scottish poet, editor and critic, whose Elegies(1985), a moving account of his first wife’s death, became a critical and popular success. His books –including ten collections of poetryand two of short stories, and a translation of Racine’sAndromache–are consistently well reviewed in the national press, while his work has been the object of much academic attention and has been extensively translated (there are editions in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovak, Armenian and Japanese, at least). He has edited anthologies of poetry from Hull, Scotland and Ireland, and has regularly reviewed books for a range of publications including the Glasgow Herald,Times Literary Supplement and The New Yorker.
Douglas won the Saltire Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 National Book Awards.
About Vicki Feaver
Vicki was born in Nottingham in 1943 and educated at Durham University and University College, London. She is the author of three poetry collections:Close Relatives(1981);The Handless Maiden (1994), winner of the Heinemann Award and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of the Year; andThe Book of Blood(2006), shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Poetry Award.The Handless Maiden includes the poems 'Lily Pond', winner of the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition, and 'Judith', winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem. In 1993 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and in 1999 a Cholmondeley Award.
Her work has also been included in several contemporary poetry anthologies includingPenguin Modern Poets 2(1995) (with Carol Ann Duffy and Eavan Boland),After Ovid(1996), an anthology of several translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945(1998). Professor Feaver has also published essays on the process of writing and on 20th-century women poets.
She is a former tutor of Creative Writing at University College, Chichester, and now lives in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.
About Diana Hendry
Diana was born in the Wirral and grew up by the sea.She did very badly at school –falling in love at 13 being rather a distraction –and spent a long time catching up, which included becoming a mature student at Bristol University and later studying for an M.Litt.
Primarily a poet, Diana also writes short stories and is the author of many children’s books. She’s worked as a journalist, English teacher and a tutor at the University of Bristol,University of the West of England and the Open University. She has tutored many creative writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and for a year was writer-in-residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary.
She is a honorary member of Shore Poets, Edinburgh, and from 2008-2010 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow based at Edinburgh University. From 2015 to 2017 she was co-editor of New Writing Scotland.
She is Assistant Editor at Mariscat Press, Edinburgh.