A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of appearing at the Glasgow Aye Write Book Festival. I previewed my forthcoming novel The Incomers to a welcoming audience of about seventy. The event was a combination of readings from the novel and a dramatization of ‘The Pairty Line’.
The novel tells the story of Ellie, a young Black African who comes to live in a Scottish mining village in 1966. It draws deep parallels between the cultures of West Africa and Scotland. As well as dealing with racial prejudice, the novel also touches on colonial oppression, bigotry, bullying, class and depression. The Pairty Line is a device I used to give the villagers a voice.
In this extract Ellie finds out about the Penny for the Black Baby – a form of charity used in Scottish schools for decades before it was abolished in the late 1960’s.
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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