Alan Titley gives a deeply-considered, powerful reading on a range of socially-engaged issues. David Kinloch ranges across Paris, Scots, loneliness, gay difference, female sensibility, doubt and painting – in a richly allusive style plumbing the ‘Old Alliance’ of things and words – before ending with a suite of Lockdown poems, recording the strange irony of its ‘touching gifts’, ‘simple pleasure‘ and ‘heartwood’, whereby ‘we learn our meanings from the words we have already used’. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed on from the Crossways Festivals of 2018 and 2019, which were staged in Glasgow and ..read more

Biddy Jenkinson’s reading shows her at her best, with her typical brilliance, irreverence and joi de vivre. Gently questioning, the Skye poet, Maoilios Campbell, makes bold juxtapositions between the nostalgic, the scientific and the faithful. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed on from the Crossways Festivals of 2018 and 2019, which were staged in Glasgow and which featured writers and performers in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English. The particular aim of Crossways is to foster and expand literary links across the North Channel. In 2021, it brought together Irish writers from across the i ..read more

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh considers the impact of motherhood and aspects of language. The novelist, Catrìona Lexy Campbell, reads from Samhraidhean Dìomhair (Secret Summers) and Cluicheadairean (Players), which handle inter-personal themes new to Gaelic prose. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed on from the Crossways Festivals of 2018 and 2019, which were staged in Glasgow and which featured writers and performers in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English. The particular aim of Crossways is to foster and expand literary links across the North Channel. In 2021, it brought together Irish writers from ..read more

Nuala Ní Dhómhnaill takes us on a whistle-stop tour of her internationally acclaimed poetic career, reading some of her most celebrated works. A gentle, fully bilingual, reading from sixty years of poetry-making (cf. butter-churning), by Aonghas Dubh MacNeacail, reflecting on the Skye of his childhood and a life in the arts. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed on from the Crossways Festivals of 2018 and 2019, which were staged in Glasgow and which featured writers and performers in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English. The particular aim of Crossways is to foster and expand literary links acr ..read more

Jessica Traynor moves seamlessly through a series of poems registering both the local and global: Dublin rivers, histories of the Irish State, and family life; ecological calamity and the migrant crisis; national nostalgia and corrupt privilege; the demands of feminism and the experience of new motherhood. In a dramatic reading full of Glaswegian humour, Andrew O’Hagan reads a passage from his latest novel, Mayflies, about an Eighties schoolboy striking out from a council estate and dysfunctional family for the hopeful promise of higher education; an extract from a short-story about a son, a m ..read more

With work of rich metaphorical and writerly reach, Peter Sirr offers rare and multifarious insights across a variety of contexts: a hymn to bookshops and reading; a whale’s afterlife; atmospherics of a Covid summer; the impossibility of fitting language’s endless promise to perception’s unfolding inclusivity; the importance of invisible things; beautiful details of departed family life – amongst many others. Shetlander Robert Alan Jamieson reads from his latest book, Plague Clothes, written as he recovered from Covid-19, an unforgettable record of the physical illness itself – as well as a rev ..read more

Unmatched for her performative music, Paula Meehan takes us on a journey into the sources and resources of a life in poetry, touching along the way on song, folklore, aisling, memorialization, and the ancient obligations of the poetic vocation. Amidst the ‘bleak midwinter’ of the Pandemic, Kathleen Jamie strikes an optimistic note, reading great poems on longing and hope; midsummer light; common natural beauties; the search for the miraculous; mother-love; bright memories of parents; and the persistence of an immanent majesty in life. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed on from the Crossways Festi ..read more

Aifric Mac Aodha examines indecision and celebrates romantic love. Fresh, sonorous poetry from Eòghan Stiùbhart, of varied metrical forms inspired by Sorley MacLean, Pink Floyd, Neruda and the Arabic qasida, among others. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed on from the Crossways Festivals of 2018 and 2019, which were staged in Glasgow and which featured writers and performers in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English. The particular aim of Crossways is to foster and expand literary links across the North Channel. In 2021, it brought together Irish writers from across the island of Ireland, toge ..read more

Two transnational writers – with work rooted in the Balkans, Ireland and Scotland – appear together for the first time. Chris Agee reads from his fourth collection, Blue Sandbar Moon, ‘a micro-epic’ that explores with delicate precision the emotional and spiritual landscape of a life sustained in the ‘aftermath of aftermath’. Kapka Kassabova reads the final chapter of her most recent non-fiction book, To the Lake, evoking Lake Ohrid (North Macedonia) and the icon-like ‘ghosts’ of our own lives, in a prose of utmost mythological, psychological and verbal beauty. Virtual Crossways 2021 followed ..read more