Quines

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About the Book: 

Quines: Poems in tribute to women of Scotland gives voice to 57 women from BC to the 21st century. The ‘voices’ of the poems range from those of the women featured, to inanimate objects – queens, politicians, a ship, a fish gutter, scientists, a mountain, sportswomen (including a whole football team) and many more.  QUINES celebrates the richly diverse contribution women have made to Scottish history and society.

Reviews:

Quines is a vivid explosion of thought, description and bold opinion, clothing Scots history at last with the myriad contribution of its women. Gerda Stevenson personifies figures often left as dry as dust and reinstates the dignity and complexity of female characters who have helped shape society and reach across the centuries to modern women today. Her use of Scots language and Gaelic phrasing adds authenticity and smeddum. This is a wonderful, life-affirming book. LESLEY RIDDOCH

Clutch this book of wondrous odes to your bosom – it will gladden your heart, sadden it but also fill you with pride. What women they were that birthed our Scottish nation and here they are, exquisitely brought to vibrant life, by that contemporary cultural quine, Gerda Stevenson. BARONESS HELENA KENNEDY QC

There’s a telling verse about Jesus in Mark’s gospel: ‘Where did this man get all this? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ The italics tell the story. The sisters are not named! And rarely have been in a history written by men. In this piercingly challenging and beautiful collection by Gerda Stevenson they are being named at last. And reading it bites the heart. RICHARD HOLLOWAY

About the Author:

GERDA STEVENSONis an award-winning writer, actor, theatre director and singer-songwriter. She has worked on stage, television, radio, film and in opera, throughout the UK and abroad. She is a recipient of Scottish Arts Council and Creative Scotland writers’ bursaries, won the YES Arts Festival Poetry Challenge in 2013, and the Robert Tannahill Poetry Prize in 2017. Her stage play Federer Versus Murray, directed by the author, toured to New York in 2012 and was published there by Salmagundi. In 2014 she was nominated as Scots Singer of the Year for the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards, following the launch of an album of her own songs Night Touches Day. She has written extensively for radio, including original plays and dramatisations of Scottish novels. Her first poetry collection, If This Were Real (Smokestack Books, 2013), was published in 2017 by Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, as Se Questo Fosse Vero, translated into Italian by Laura Maniero. Gerda wrote the biographical introduction and a series of poems for the book Inside & Out: The Art of Christian Small, which she also edited (Lyne Press, 2018, now published by Scotland Street Press, 2019). Her most recent book is Edinburgh, a collaboration with Scottish landscape photographer Allan Wright, for which she wrote the introduction and a sequence of twenty-two poems (Allan Wright Photographic, 2019). A seasoned performer, she won a BAFTA Best Film Actress award for her role in Margaret Tait’s feature film Blue Black Permanent, and is the founder of Stellar Quines, Scotland’s leading women’s theatre company.