Garry has taught on the Creative Writing Summer School at St Andrews since 2010, and since 2018 has tutored for the Open College of the Arts (OCA), the distance learning arm of the University for the Creative Arts. He teaches poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and regularly contributes to OCA’s WeAreOCA blog on issues to do with writing.
He also teaches public creative writing workshops for St Andrews Open Association. He has given readings as part of Book Week Scotland, The St Andrews Literary Festival and On the Rocks Festival. He is available for readings, workshops, residential courses, Q&A sessions, and to chair author events.
At undergraduate level he has taught a wide range of English literature from the sixteenth century to the present day, in genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction and drama, as well as film, television and graphic fiction. He has run non-degree classes on topics such as ‘Finding your way around literary prizes’, ‘A literary journey round Scotland’, ‘Contemporary landscape poetry’ and ‘The origins of Tartan Noir’. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, which recognises excellence in teaching and curriculum design, and in 2014 was awarded the inaugural St Leonard’s Prize, a four-part public lecture series based on his PhD research, at the University of St Andrews.
Along with Professor Robert Crawford, Garry led the Chinese Makars translation workshops at St Andrews in 2015 and 2018. These workshops brought together Chinese students and students familiar with the Scots tongue, to produce original Scots versions of classic Chinese poems. Poems written in the workshops were published in the 2016 pamphlet Loch Diànnăo, and also exhibited in the One World exhibition at MUSA, the Museum of the University of St Andrews. Chinese Makars was part of the outreach from the Loch Computer research project, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish Government. Garry has also led classes on nature writing for school pupils as part of the AHRC-funded Land Lines project.
In 2019 Garry will be directing the residential course ‘Scottish Crime Writing: from Gothic Horror to Tartan Noir’ for Smithsonian Journeys. It runs from 4th-10th August in St Andrews.
Garry MacKenzie 