Applications are invited from writers who wish to spend a year working with literary and wider communities in Orkney, as the inaugural George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow.
Along with a deserved reputation for the richness of its cultural heritage and for the distinctive character it possesses as a place and as a community, Orkney is well known nowadays for the quality and range of its arts activities. Altogether, it is one of the most vibrant and stimulating communities of its size anywhere in the country.
A key component of Orkney’s present-day sense of itself is its considerable literary heritage, something that stretches back to the Norse sagas. During the twentieth century, figures such as Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater and George Mackay Brown have been the most prominent of the islands’ writers in national and international terms, though numerous others have contributed more locally in no small measure. Orkney is home today to many writers: from those whose work is widely published right across the scale to those just waiting for the right circumstances to begin.
The George Mackay Brown Writing Fellowship aims to provide those circumstances, and to stimulate a wide appreciation of writing not only in itself but as a means for personal and social growth. Importantly, it will help create a proper, living context in which to celebrate the work of Orkney writers past and present, and it will provide the recipient with an ideal opportunity to continue with their own work.
The Fellowship will be a freelance contract reporting to the Arts Development Service of Orkney Islands Council as the client. It is funded by the Scottish Arts Council’s partners residency programme, the Arts Development Service and Orkney’s Community Economic Development Programme.
Closing date for applications: 16th November 2006
For further information and an application pack, please contact:
Clare Gee
Arts Development Officer
Orkney Islands Council
School Place
Kirkwall
Orkney
KW15 1NY
Tel. 01856 873535 extn. 2814
Email. clare.gee@orkney.gov.uk
