Does winning the TS Elliot prize making writing easier, or harder?
I’m hoping it’s going to make it possible. Not just financially – but feeling confirmed as a poet, that I might have a right to put my voice out there. I do feel some expectation, which alarms me slightly. The frustrating thing at the moment is that I’m working my six weeks notice at my part time job. I’m desperate to get writing, but I’m just very, very busy. What’s the job? I work in a gallery. It’s a smashing place, but I’m a kind of front of house person and I just shouldn’t be allowed to do that, but I have smashing colleagues. You use bits of Shetland dialect in the book – gimmer, doit, blashy-wadder. There’s a sense of a fragile ecology there, of language evaporating and diversity being lost to English. It’s undoubtedly a fragile ecology. I hear from old folk that there are quite a number of vocabulary items that have been lost. Having said that, like Gallic, there’s been this huge upswing in interest in preserving the dialect. People are aware of the vast regional differences w
