Fellowship is ‘absolute honour’ for Alycia

THE recipient of this year’s Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow has been announced.

Alycia Pirmohamed, above, has been selected and has now begun her year-long literary fellowship, which is supported by Creative Scotland.

Hosted by DG Unlimited in Dumfries and Galloway, the annual fellowship is in honour of the late writer and cultural leader Dr Gavin Wallace and supports a writer for one year to create new literary work.

Writing in response to the theme, Unfolding Scotland, Alycia will spend her year researching, writing and engaging with the landscapes, communities and cultural life across the region and across Scotland, producing new work that responds to the theme, to contemporary Scotland and its stories.

She described it as an ‘absolute honour’, adding: “My proposed project, tentatively titled Even Now the Waterline Wavers, is a cross-genre collection that explores hybridity both as a subject and in form. It considers the connections between homeland – with all of its slippery definitions – ecology, and the Anthropocene, and is guided by questions of how embodiment and the legacies of colonialism and capitalism affect how we interact with the natural world.”

Author of the debut poetry collection, Another Way to Split Water, Alycia was born in Canada and lives in Scotland.

Her debut non-fiction book, Shorelines: Memory, migration, and the selves we become, won the Nan Shepherd Prize. Her other awards, include a Pushcart Prize, the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, and she currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s programme at the University of Cambridge.

Congratulating her, Tabitha Mudaliar, of DG Unlimited, said: “Alycia’s Fellowship year will be defined by creative freedom, cultural connections, and opportunities to explore and meet people around our region and beyond.

“The Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship is a unique and prestigious opportunity for Alycia to have the space to write, reflect, and imagine, and ensure that her voice contributes to the evolving story of who we are as a nation.”