Crossways: The Irish Scottish Cultural & Literary Festival
9th ~ 15th April 2018 ~ Merchant City, Glasgow

Bernie McGill and Beatrice Colin will read from their work at this Crossways Festival event at the Vic Bar in the Tron Theatre, Glasgow.

Beatrice Colin is the author of the novel To Capture What We Cannot Keep, published in the US in 2016 by Flatiron Books as well as in the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Poland and the Czech Republic in 2017. She also wrote The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite (published as The Glimmer Palace in the US) and The Songwriter. She has been shortlisted for a British Book Award, a Saltire Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award and writes short stories, screen and radio plays and for children. One of her children’s novels, My Invisible Sister (with Sara Pinto) has been made into a film for TV by Disney in the US. Her novel for children, Pyrate’s Boy is written under the name E.B. Colin and published by Floris Books. Beatrice is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Strathclyde University in Glasgow.

Bernie McGill is the author of the novels The Watch House and The Butterfly Cabinet and the short story collection Sleepwalkers, shortlisted in 2014 for the Edge Hill Prize. She has been published in the UK, the US and in translation in Italy and the Netherlands. Her work has been placed in the Seán Ó Faoláin, the Bridport, and the Michael McLaverty short story prizes and she won the Zoetrope: All-Story award in the US in 2008. Her short fiction has appeared in acclaimed anthologies The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore and Female Lines, all by New Island Books, and for the theatre she has written The Haunting of Helena Blunden and The Weather Watchers. She works as a creative writing facilitator, as a professional mentor with the Irish Writers’ Centre and as a writer in schools for Poetry Ireland.

The particular aim of the Crossways Festival is to foster and expand the rather weak literary links between Ireland and Scotland across the North Channel. It brings together notable Irish writers, musicians, filmmakers and cultural figures – from both North and South – together with their Scottish peers, in a well-planned and well-balanced Festival focussing on the longstanding contribution of Irish people, history, language, culture and writing to both Glasgow and the Scottish nation.The overall balance is about one-third Irish, one-third Diaspora Irish-Scottish, and one-third Scottish.