Journeys by sea and land : Ian Stephen

Saturday March 24th 2012

Ian was born on Stornaway and still lives there. He worked for the Coastguard Service for many years but has been a full time writer and artist since winning the first Robert Louis Stevenson Award in 1995.

He is currently Reader in Residence, Western Isles Libraries where has been researching traditional stories, recorded in the Hebrides, but from an oral tradition. Ian will take us on journeys both by both land and sea, in poetry and prose and read a selection of his lyrical poems of voyaging.

Stephen writes well of the bare islanded north and its seascapes, its loneliness and stark, sporadic collisions with the geopolitical and
industrial-technological realities, of the view from the top of the world.

David McDuff in Stand Magazine

– seas, winds and tides, shorelines and horizons – are expressed in precisely observed details of shape, colour, texture and movement that capture the spirit of a place as well as the topography in poem after poem until voyaging becomes both fact and metaphor in Stephen’s work, a way of life and a way of interpreting life.
James Aitchieson, The Glasgow Herald