McMillan’s Galloway

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About the Book: 

McMillan: Scottish poet who once almost moved away from Dumfries and Galloway, but decided against it in the end.

Galloway: an oft-ignored corner of south-west Scotland known as the home of reivers and fairies, the last resting place of Robert Burns and the only constituency in the country to elect a Tory MP.

Guidebook: a forum for authors to offer up anecdotes in an authoritative manner, with little regard to that thin line between truth and fiction.

McMillan’s Galloway takes the reader on a whimsical tour of Dumfries and Galloway through the people, places and myths of the area. Topics include the pub where Britt Ekland did not film the seductive bum scene in The Wicker Man, the striking similarities between fairies and little green men and the unexpected revelation of Lawrence of Arabia’s tenancy in Kirkcudbright.

A witty cabinet of curiosities, McMillan’s reimagining of John Mactaggart’s 1824 Gallovidian Encyclopaedia collects the poetry of his beloved Dumfries and Galloway from Burns to the present day, and affectingly delves into the area’s continued issues of depopulation and land ownership.

Despite his irreverent tone, McMillan’s love of this corner of Scotland is obvious, and you’d be hard pressed to finish McMillan’s Galloway without feeling that you, too, might like to move to a wee village on an unreliable bus route somewhere west of Dumfries. Though you’ll change your mind once you find out it probably no longer has a pub.

Reviews: 

WRITER Hugh McMillan has brought together a collection of irreverent stories about Dumfries and Galloway in the book just published by Luath Press "McMillan's Galloway". In it he tells of the Dumfries local, famous for being an excellent fishermen who was notoriously poor at having permits for it, being asked in the pub if he could secure a large salmon for someone willing to pay him for it. THE HERALD

Although this unconventional guidebook is irreverent in tone, it's clear that McMillan's feelings for Galloway run deep. And we're sure yours will too, after joining MacMillan on this witty and whimsical tour of his homeland. SCOTLAND MAGAZINE

One could say that McMillan’s Galloway is an Encyclopaedia in the same way that the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a travel book. His Galloway is less a geographic than an imaginary space, an imagined place more like, built on and in dialogue with perspectives borrowed from those who have written, drawn, filmed or simply visited it in the past. ALISTAIR FINDLAY

spent two weeks searching for a zeppelin base near new Galloway. I am deeply disappointed by the research that has gone into this book. TONY BARBOUR

A sort of public transport road movie, where mostly it is raining and the narrator not in good shape. ANDREW GRIEG

About the Author:

HUGH MCMILLAN is a poet from Penpont in Dumfries and Galloway. He has written five full collections of poetry and has read in events and poetry festivals worldwide. His pamphlet Postcards from the Hedge was a winner of the Callum Macdonald Prize in 2009, a prize he won again for Sheepenned in 2017; as part of that prize, he became Michael Marks Poet in Residence for the Harvard Summer School in Napflio, Greece. He was also a winner of the Smith Doorstep Poetry Prize and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Devorgilla’s Bridge was shortlisted for the Micael Marks Award and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Basil Bunting Poetry Award. In 2014 Hugh was awarded the first literature commission by the Wigtown Book Festival to create a work inspired by John Mactaggart’s The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopaedia (1824); McMillan’s Galloway was published in limited edition in 2015 and in a revised edition from Luath in 2016. He has featured in many anthologies, and three times in the Scottish Poetry Library’s online selection Best Scottish Poems of the year. His poems have also been chosen three times to feature on National Poetry Day postcards, the latest in 2016. In 2020 he was chosen by the Scottish Poetry Library as one of four ‘Poetry Champions’ for Scotland, to seek out and commission new work, and was given the role as editor of Best Scottish Poems 2021.