Margaret Elphinstone has published eight novels as well as short stories and poetry. Her fiction is mostly historical and is characterised by her portrayal of people on journeys to places on the edge – islands, frontiers - where cultures and ideas meet and evolve.
THE MOST RECENT NOVEL
The Gathering Night, set among the hunter-gatherers of Mesolithic Scotland, is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disaster. This pre-historical novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable for our troubled planet 8000 years on.Find out more about researching a Mesolithic novel and read the reviews in full
The Gathering Night is published by Canongate Books. ISBN 9781847672889
The second edition was published in 2010.
The Gathering Night has been published in German as Die Nacht Jagerinnen by Dumont and in Italian as La Notte del Raduno by Einaudi.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
10 February'Local authors on air'
Alive Radio Dumfries
Margaret Elphinstone will feature "In interview" at 1.30 p.m.
22 February
Writing Historical Fiction:unleashing imagination while harnessing facts.
University of the Third Age lecture.
2.00 p.m. Gordon Hall, St Ninian's Church, Castle Douglas, Galloway.
Admission: non-members £3.
1 March
In Process: reflections on the creative process.
The Scottish Writers' Centre workshop.
7.00 p.m. Clubroom, CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow
22 March
Launch of the open space at The Glasgow Womens' Library
Details to be announced.
27-29 April
Conversations @ The Edge at Isle of Colonsay Book Festival
26 May
The Big Lit Day at Gatehouse of Fleet. Part of the Dumfries & Galloway Festival. Margaret will be speaking on writing historical novels. Full details to be announced.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Unknown Island, an essay by Margaret Elphinstone, is published in Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind edited by Torstein Jorgensen and Gerhard Jaritz and published by Central European University Press, Budapest, 2011. ISBN 978-615-5053-24-5Walking the Edges
Margaret Elphinstone's Walking the Edges, an account of walking in the Scottish mountains, appears in A Wilder Vein, an anthology of literary non-fiction focusing on people and wild places, edited by Linda Cracknell and published by Two Ravens Press.
See other recent writing
OTHER NOVELS IN PRINT
All of Margaret Elphinstone's novels are in print.Light, Voyageurs, Hy Brasil and The Sea Road are all published by Canongate Books. The Sea Road appears in '100 Best Scottish Books of All Time' produced by List Magazine.
Gato is published by Sandstone Press for new and emergent adult readers. Margaret Elphinstone's three earliest novels, Islanders, A Sparrow's Flight and The Incomer or Clachanpluck, have all been republished by Kennedy & Boyd.
Contacts and Links
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