Speak for Yourself

A booklet edited by Duncan McLean with writings by Hera Lindsay Bird, Simon W Hall, Morag MacInnes, Craig Marriner, Alison Miller and CK Stead.

'What emerges is not insularity, but what might be described as positive 'insularism.' As well as being receptive to outside cultural and literary influences, the Orkney identity has always absorbed - and will always continue to absorb - new languages, new ethnicities.' Simon W Hall, The History of Orkney Literature. 

'The importance of the local in literature is immense - the more so if your region is only emerging, as ours has been over my lifetime, from a phase of colonialism in which the sense of what is 'real' has been in some degree compromised by an inherited literature and literary history which cannot deal at all with what is immediate to hand.' CK Stead, Kin of Place.