Guests

Performers who have appeared with the Blue Salt Collective

John Glenday was born in 1952 and currently works as an addictions counsellor with NHS Highland.

He is the author of two collections: The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; and Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Poems have been anthologised in the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry (Faber and Faber, 1992); The Firebox (Picador, 1998); and New British Poetry (Grey Wolf Press, 2004).

He was appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow for 1990/91, based at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Mhairi Allan is an Aberdeen based performer, dance tutor and choreographer with a background in contemporary dance. She has worked with many diverse groups of dancers of various ages and abilities in both a community and professional context. Recent work has been as performer in Sweet Love with Janis Claxton Dance at the CCA in Glasgow.

Previous collaborations with the Blue Salt Collective have inspired and stimulated her love of poetry and music and continue to fuel her passion for choreographic ideas.

Judith Taylor comes from Perthshire and now lives and works in Aberdeen, where she is a member of Lemon Tree Writers. She writes poetry in English and sometimes Scots, and her first chapbook collection, Earthlight, was published in 2006 by Koo Press. She was Poet Number 91 in the StAnza 100 Poets Gathering in St Andrews in March 2007.

Douglas W Gray lives in Cove Bay; founder member of the Dead Good Poets, former editor of poetry magazines Storm and Spume, published widely. Awards include: second prize in the Northwords Open Poetry Competiton 1998, first prize in the Feile Filiochta Open Poetry Competiton and the Irish Times Perpetual Trophy 2001, second placed in the Scottish International Poetry Competition 2003, and winner of the Ayr 800 Open Poetry Competition 2005.

Helen Elizabeth Ramsey is presently lurching from crisis to crisis and becoming scattier by the day. She is hoping that when the dust settles (literally) at home, and her sense of humour kicks in, the sagas of the last six months will provide oodles of new material. At the moment she is looking back at her time spent working in the woods and walking the tightrope between autobiography and fiction.