Roderick Watson in Conversation with Alan Riach

Roderick Watson was born in Aberdeen and educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, Aberdeen University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He taught at the University of Victoria in Canada, then was Professor, now Professor Emeritus, at the University of Stirling. He has lectured and published widely on modern Scottish literature. He served as General Editor of the Canongate Classics reprint series since the start of the project in 1987, is currently the co-editor of The Journal of Stevenson Studies, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Watson was one of the ‘Heretics’ performers in Edinburgh in the 1970s. His poetry publications include True History on the Walls (1977), Into the Blue Wavelengths (2004) and The Silver of Old Mirrors (2025).

Alan Riach, a more recent member of the 'Heretics' group and Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, is, like Rory, both scholarly critic and poet. Their conversation will be a celebration of Rory's new book of poems and an introduction to the new reprinting of the classic novels of Neil Gunn, especially the centenary edition of The Grey Coast (1926). They will be ranging widely across the work of poetry and scholarship, both retrieving works from the past and recollecting personal experiences for a contemporary poetry readership.

The Zoom Link to attend online is: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/84847985257

Creative Conversations is supported generously by The Ferguson Bequest. Professor Thomas Ferguson (1900-1977), Henry Mechan Chair of Public Health (1944-64), bequeathed his estate to the University, with the instruction that the money should be used to foster the social side of University life.