July 25th @ 7.30
Christine De Luca, who writes in both English and Shetlandic, is a native Shetlander who lives in Edinburgh. One voice, two tongues & twin identities.  She was appointed Edinburgh’s Makar or poet laureate in 2014.  

Tuesday 26 May 2015 provided a rare opportunity to meet Bernard Kops, one of the great post-war Jewish playwrights, poets and novelists, at The Bakehouse.

He read his poems and from his acclaimed biography ‘The World is a Wedding’, and was in conversation with poet and director Chrys Salt MBE who has directed some of his plays for the London stage.

Just a few of the comments from our audience. Thanks to The Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival for their support.

'What a treasure was Bernard!'

'I really enjoyed last night and was very sad to leave at the interval (he had me in tears with the Ann Frank)'

'Thank you very much for the opportunity to hear Bernard Kops yesterday evening. It was a great privilege to meet him and to be able to tell him how much I enjoyed "The Dissent of Dominic Shapiro", both in my youth and subsequently.
His talk was fascinating - and humorous. I loved his line about babies asleep with their arms raised:
"Why are they surrendering when they have already captured us?"

'Thanks for the Bernard Kops evening which we have talked about continuously. It was a really super event, full of memories of a wonderful wordsmith......absolutely loved it ! What a coup to get him to Gatehouse' .

.'...that was so good. Bernard really inhabits his work. Brilliant, so emotionally alive and Erica - the way they are a part of each other. We were all spellbound as we travelled from Holland to Hamlet'

Here he is reading his poem "Two Tall Ladies"

Saturday 28 March 7.00pm for 7.30pm
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England in 1956 after the Hungarian Uprising. He is the author of some fifteen books of poetry and roughly the same of translation from Hungarian. He was joint winner, with Hugo William, of the Faber Prize with his first book, The Slant Door (1979) and has won a number of prizes since. In 2004 he was awarded the T S Eliot Prize for his book, Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books and for Bad Machine Subsequent awards and prizes, including International awards for translation,  are too numerous to mention. George will be reading from his many collections.

Appeared Saturday February 28th 2015

Appeared Saturday January 31st 2015

The Bakehouse presents McMillan’s AMAZING Gallovidian Encyclopaedia
Join ‘Penpont’s Pepys’, Hugh McMillan, for a witty and irreverent look at contemporary Dumfries and Galloway - this unique place which operated for so long as an entity completely separate from its neighbours Scotland and England, a land that was shrouded in myth and populated by warriors, emigrants, fairies and liars. Some say it still is ...

Appeared: Saturday November 29th 2014

Chris Agee is the author of three books of poems, most recently Next to Nothing (Salt, 2009), shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. He has also edited Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (Bloodaxe, 1998, Poetry Society Recommendation), Unfinished Ireland: Essays on Hubert Butler (Irish Pages, 2003), The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland (Salt, 2011) and The Other Tongues: An Introduction to Writing in Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots in Ulster and Scotland (Irish Pages, 2013). He is the Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, Ireland’s premier literary journal, and currently the Keith Wright Literary Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

One up and coming. One up and come!

Appeared: Saturday October 25th

CATRIONA McPHERSON

Multi-award winning novelist Catriona was born in Scotland in 1965 and now lives in California. She has written nine detectives stories set in Scotland in the 1920s. The latest is the Aberdeenshire-set DANDY GILVER AND THE REEK OF RED HERRINGS.

THE DAY SHE DIED, currently long listed for Kirkus Book Of The Year, is set in Dumfries and at Gatehouse and draws heavily on her ten years of living in New Galloway and sitting on the beach at Sandgreen staring at the Solway.
"Keep the lights on and batten down the hatches, for McPherson's psychologically terrifying stand-alone demands to be read all night ... a top-notch tale of modern gothic suspense" Library Journal.

KATE TOUGH

Kate’s debut novel HEAD FOR THE EDGE, KEEP WALKING was selected for W H Smith’s summer travel book club, the Kindle Summer Sale and was ‘pick of the day’ on Radio Scotland. Achieved *****on Amazon, it has just secured a North American release.

“Exciting new voice in Scottish literature. Keep an eye out for this one.” Kevin MacNeil

“A warm and ferociously witty tale of the s**t life throws at us and how to survive it. Truth rings from every page.” Zoe Strachan.

Richie McCaffery

Appeared: Saturday March 29th 2014

As part of the First World War Commemorations Chrys Salt and Brian Johnstone join forces to offer a moving programme of poetry, prose, film and music  evoking war and the losses of war from Flanders to Iraq – from the Blitz to Bosnia.

Appeared: Saturday February 22nd 2014

Arab poet Iyad Hayatleh and Scottish Poet Tessa Ransford present A Rug of a Thousand Colours a creative dialogue, in Arabic and English inspired by the five pillars of Islam. Iyad from the perspective of a Muslim from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Syria (now resident in Glasgow). Tessa from a Christian and Quaker background, with links to India and Pakistan. Tessa and Iyad will be happy to answer questions about the process of their fascinating collaboration.