About

Garry MacKenzie is a writer, creative writing tutor and literature scholar living in Fife, Scotland. He is the author of Scotland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Tauris), an introduction to literature from and about Scotland. Ranging from Ancient Greek travel writing to present day crime fiction, as well as covering poetry written in Scotland’s three main languages, Scotland explores how the country’s history, landscape and society are brought to life in literature.

Garry is also a poet and is currently working on a long poem, Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain. This includes a free translation of Duncan Bàn Macintyre’s In Praise of Ben Dorain, an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem about a West Highland mountain and its herd of red deer. Garry’s poem combines translation with original material reflecting contemporary ecological research, environmental philosophy and the politics of land use, in order to form a conversation between the 250-year-old poem and the modern world. In 2017 he held an Artist’s Residency at Outlandia Field Station, near Fort William, to work on Ben Dorain.

Garry has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award for his poetry. His poem ‘Newcastle Central Station’ won the 2016 Wigtown Poetry Competition, and his ‘Photograph of Newcastle United Football Club Changing Rooms, 1938’ won the 2009 Robert McLellan Poetry Award. His poems have been published in journals including Dark Mountain, Reliquiae, The Compass, Corbel Stone Press’s Contemporary Poetry series, The Scores and Zoomorphic.

He has an MLitt in creative writing and a PhD in contemporary poetry from the University of St Andrews. He teaches undergraduate and community education courses in literature and creative writing at St Andrews, and also works as a creative writing tutor for the University for the Creative Arts. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.