'Hame an Awa – Scots Wurds in Irish Toonlands' with Alan Millar

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Hame an awa – Scots wurds in Irish toonlands

With Alan Millar

Thursday 28 November 2024, 1pm

Tower Museum, Derry

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Born and reared in the Laggan of East Donegal, Millar explores the interconnections of locality and language running through his own work, using as his touchstone the glossary and subscribers list of Newton-Cunningham poet George Dugall’s ‘The Northern Cottage’, published exactly 200 years ago this year. Through the words of the glossary and the townlands named on the subscribers list, we are transported back to a very familiar, yet strikingly different world. The glossary, filled with Ulster-Scots dialect still spoken today, is layered through with many words now lost to the Laggan, but still alive in other places, creating a sense of shared Scots language, running past into present, between Fintown and the Shetlands. The subscribers list teems with Irish townland names, giving the address of every person who bought Dugall’s book. The subscribers may be long dead, but the townlands remain as intimately recognisable today as the day the book was printed. Join Alan on his anniversary journey through these idiosyncrasies, tracing their contemporary resonance through his own work and how his latest poetry project led him in the footsteps of St. Columba to the Hebrides and to Sligo.

About the speaker: Alan Millar comes from the Laggan area of east Donegal and is now based in Ballymoney, Co Antrim. He is a journalist, writer and poet in Ulster-Scots and English. In 2021 he was winner of the Hugh MacDiarmid Tassie for Scots poetry and the inaugural Linenhall Library Ulster-Scots short story competition. In 2023 Alan was winner of the Linenhall Library Ulster-Scots poetry competition and had a top-placed Ulster-Scots poem in the inaugural Thomas Carnduff Shipyard Poetry Competition. The author writes an Ulster-Scots column for the Ballymoney Chronicle called ‘Leid Loanen’, or Language Lane. His first collection of poetry ‘Echas frae tha Big Swilly Swally’ was published in May 2023. He was nominated for Scots Writer of the Year, in the 2023 Scots Language Awards and is currently working his ACNI-supported second poetry collection, ‘Frae Erris tae Wrath’.

 Admission Free / Light refreshments provided from 12:30pm before each talk

Please book your place by contacting the Tower Museum (028) 7137 2411 or email tower@derrystrabane.com

Entrance Fee