Collier Laddie

Shortlisted for the Scots Book o the Year at the Scots Language Awards 2024.

Our Ebooks are powered by Glassboxx
Click here to learn about our Ebooks.

About the Book: 

A powerful Ode to Mining Grit and Working-Class Resilience FORTY YEARS ON FROM the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike

Forty years on from the 1984–85 UK Miners’ Strike, the largest union-led industrial action in the 20th century, Rab Wilson – a former miner deeply entrenched in the strike – delivers a powerful narrative through his mining poems and strike diary, addressing contemporary social and economic issues in Scotland and the UK then and now.

Having toiled in Scotland’s mining industry for eight years, Rab provides an authentic voice that resonates with the struggles faced during the strike, vividly captured from his involvement between 12 March 1984 and 5 March 1985. This book serves as a testament to the working-class struggle, offering a unique perspective on the historical significance of Scotland’s mining industry, skillfully expressed by a poet intimately connected to it. Rab Wilson emerges as an essential chronicler, ensuring the legacy of the miners’ challenging strike endures in the pages of this evocative and timely work.

Collier Laddie is an ode to resilience, solidarity and the enduring legacy of those who fought for justice during a pivotal moment in industrial history.

Praise for Rab Wilson:

Anyone who has an enquiring mind and an interest in all things beyond our world will find this a fascinating read. Scottish Field on Oor Big Braw Cosmos

Our traditional language could hardly have a more eloquent exponent. Lesley Duncan on Accent O the Mind

About the Author:

RAB WILSON is one of Scotland’s most accomplished poets. He was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. As a Scots poet, his work appears regularly in The Herald, Chapman, Lallans and Markings magazines and he is the author of a number of highly praised volumes of poetry and a Burns scholar.

Rab has performed his work at the Edinburgh Festival, the StAnza poetry festival at St Andrews, the ‘Burns an a’ That Festival’ at Ayr and has been ‘Bard of the Festival’ at Wigtown, Scotland’s National Booktown. Additionally Rab is a previous winner of the McCash Poetry Prize and was ‘Robert Burns Writing Fellow – In Reading Scots’ for Dumfries and Galloway Region. He has worked with the artist Calum Colvin on a book of responses to Burns and he is the Scriever in Residence for the National Trust for Scotland based at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayr. Currently a member of the National Committee for the Scots Language Resource Centre, Rab regularly attends the parliamentary Cross Party Group for Scots language held at Holyrood. He is a ‘weel-kent’ advocate for Scots writing. He lives in New Cumnock with his wife Margaret and daughter Rachel.