Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us. George Szirtes

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

The mountaineer climbs the mountain because it's there; the poet writes poetry so that it should continue to be there.

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

I think of poetry as an art of seeing, an art by which, in my blindness, I learn to see. - Jeremy Hooker, 'At the Edge'

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