Walter Perrie

Walter Perrie is a Scottish poet, editor, critic and publisher. He was born into a mining village in South Lanarkshire in June 1949 and after Hamilton Academy, worked for several years in the Burgh Library before removing to Edinburgh in 1970 to read for an M.A. in philosophy, to which he later added the M. Phil. from Stirling.By the age of thirty he had won a Gregory award for Poetry and his first major book of poetry (“A Lamentation for the Children”) had won a Scottish Arts Council book award. He had also been co-founder, with George Hardie, of “Chapman” magazine and was playing an active part in Scottish literary life, having interviewed Hugh MacDiarmid and organised Scottish participation in the first International Cambridge Poetry Festival, represented by Duncan Glen, Donald Campbell and Sorley Maclean.During the 1980s he travelled widely in Europe and North America, holding the post of Scottish-Canadian exchange fellow and was later writer in residence at the University of Stirling. At the same time he became managing editor of “Margin”, an international arts quarterly under the editorship of the American writer Robin Magowan. In 1988 he was the recipient of an award for his poetry from the Ingram-Merrill foundation and was later to meet and correspond with James Merrill and in 2017 to hold a Merrill Fellowship, living in Merrill’s former home in Stonington, Connecticut.In the late 1980s he moved to the Perthshire village of Dunning. In 1990, in the context of the collapse of the eastern bloc, he was to drive across eastern Europe to write “Roads that Move” and in 2000 was awarded a Society of Authors travelling scholarship. It was from Dunning that, in 2005, along with the Scottish novelist and short-story writer John Herdman, he founded “Fras” magazine and Publications and has gone on to publish over thirty books and pamphlets of Scottish letters, including interviews with Donald Campbell, Trevor Royle, Margaret Bennett and Alasdair Gray as well as twice-yearly issues of Fras magazine.Perrie’s literary interests have encompassed essays on W. H. Auden, Lord Byron, Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Morgan and Muriel Spark. He has translated some of the Fables of La Fontaine as well as poems by Jacques Prevert and continues to give French-language talks on subjects of Franco-Scottish interest.