Sangschaw 2025

Our annual writing competition, the Sangschaw, is open for submissions until the 31st of January! As ever, we will provide feedback for every entry regardless of whether or not you win an award. It’s unusual for competitions like us to provide feedback on entries, but we think it’s important to help writers develop. We have three prizes:

The Robert McLellan Prize for Scots Prose: up to 3000 words of original Scots prose.
The John MacPhail Law Prize for Translation: up to 3000 words of original translation into Scots from another language. Provide along with a copy of the original text.
The Hugh MacDiarmaid Tassie for Poetry: up to 60 lines of original Scots poetry.

Writers new and old are all welcome, so don’t hold back! We look forward to having your entries!

You can enter for £5 for one category, £10 for two or £12 for all three, whether that’s all in the same category or spread across the three. You can submit either by email or by post.

Submitting by email

If you would like to submit by email, first pay by bank transfer to the following account. Remember, it’s £5 for one submission or £12 for three.

Account name: Scots Language Society
Account number: 00153458
Sort code: 83 47 00

Then, send your entries to failte@go-plus.net along with proof of payment. For example, you could send a picture of your bank statement, or a copy of the transaction reference.

Submitting by post

If you would rather submit by post, send your entries with cash or cheque, as well as your name and address on a separate sheet of paper, to the following address:

Sangschaw
c/o 6 Dryden Place
Edinburgh
EH9 1RP

Remember, it’s £5 per submission or £12 for three. Address any cheque to the Scots Language Society.

Orgreave Stations

Wullie Hershaw, editor of Lallans, will be hosting the official launch of his new poetic sequence, The Orgreave Stations, at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh next week.

The sonnet sequence reflects on the 1984 Miner’s Strike through the lens of a radical retelling of the Stations of the Cross.

Get your tickets on Eventbrite!

Avoch album project

Musician and proud Avochie Grace Stewart Skinner has been toiling away at an album project which seeks to celebrate the vulnerable dialect of her home village of Avoch, near Inverness.

With the help of corporate funders including Creative Scotland, the hard work of research and recording the voices of local people is now all but done. All that remains is to take it to the studio, but with funding for musical projects being rather tight, she’s seeking a little more help to get the project over the line.

To learn more or pledge some support for the project, have a look at Grace’s Crowdfunder.