Strands of autobiography, a deeply sensuous ecology of place, historical narratives; the inner world of imagination and the often difficult realities of the postcolonial nation are interwoven in McWatt's bold but carefully worked out architecture. Peepal Tree

In the face of loss - human, natural, temporal - McQueen finds salvation in language. Often her work is about artistic endeavour itself: the desire to freeze time, the realisation that this is impossible - Sarah Quigley

And here is love / like a tinsmith's scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin - 'Mossbawn Sunlight', Seamus Heaney

The essence of Orkney's magic is silence, loneliness and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light. - George Mackay Brown

...if poetry is a method of approaching truths, and each of us with a human soul and 'a tongue in oor heids' can make an approach toward a truth, poetry is inherently democratic. - Kathleen Jamie

A writer is not interested in explaining reality; he's interested in capturing it. - Brendan Kennelly

My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. - Andrew Motion

With a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen. - Margaret Atwood

Young or old / What was I but the story told / By an unageing one? (Kathleen Raine, from 'Ah, many, many are the dead...')

I hope to write poetry that uses the full keyboard, claiming its full range of method and subject. - Sean O'Brien