Today is the four hundred and forty fourth anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. I first encountered him when I was given Julius Caesar in first year at school. I thought it was rubbish and couldn’t understand a word. I blame the teacher, who failed to point out the subtleties and fun in his work and that this great bard added more new words to the English language than almost anyone else, but maybe the teacher didn’t get it either.
In second year The Merchant of Venice needed no translation, I was mesmerised by Portia and thrilled by the ending.
Macbeth was next and this time the school took us to a performance at the newly opened Macrobert Centre in Stirling (I am showing my age here!). We had great fun shouting out the name of the play to the cast while they tried to perform; it was all very juvenile.
They kept the best till last and gave us Hamlet for ‘O’ Level. I can’t remember the play for the Highers, I suspect it wasn’t Shakey.
I still have the books in my bookcase, I must have ‘forgotten’ to hand them back to the school along with the copy of ‘1984’. Even at that early age I had a tendency for hoarding books, but that is another story.
Moira McPartlin’s debut novel The Incomers, published by Fledgling Press in 2012, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award. Over the next seven years Moira wrote her speculative fiction, Sun Song Trilogy novels (also published by Fledgling Press). The novels, set in 2089, reflect many issues we face today. Moira’s last novel, Before Now: Memoir of a Toerag, is written entirely in the Fife dialect and was published by her own imprint, Trilleachan Press, in May 2021.
In 2021 she became a writing fellow at Hawthornden Castle. In 2022 she was appointed the Scriever for The Federation of Writers (Scotland), and in 2024 was the recipient of a Bridges Award, a residency at Cove Park, Argyll. Her short stories and poetry have been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies.
Moira’s latest publication, A Thing So Delicate: The Hidden Voices of Scotland’s Mass Concrete Viaducts, is a collaboration with her husband, Colin. It is a hybrid about the social history surrounding the building of Scotland’s Victorian mass concrete viaducts. This includes creative nonfiction, prose, poetry, and photography.
Moira is listed on the Scottish Book Trust Live Literature Database.
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www.moiramcpartlin.com 