Gerda Stevenson

Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning writer, actor, theatre director and singer-songwriter. She has worked on stage, television, radio, film and in opera, throughout the UK and abroad. She is a recipient of Scottish Arts Council and Creative Scotland writers’ bursaries, won the YES Arts Festival Poetry Challenge in 2013, and the Robert Tannahill Poetry Prize in 2017. Her stage play Federer Versus Murray, directed by the author, toured to New York in 2012 and was published there by Salmagundi. In 2014 she was nominated as Scots Singer of the Year for the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards, following the launch of an album of her own songs Night Touches Day. She has written extensively for radio, including original plays and dramatisations of Scottish novels. Her first poetry collection, If This Were Real (Smokestack Books, 2013), was published in 2017 by Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, as Se Questo Fosse Vero, translated into Italian by Laura Maniero. Gerda wrote the biographical introduction and a series of poems for the book Inside & Out: The Art of Christian Small, which she also edited (Lyne Press, 2018, now published by Scotland Street Press, 2019). Her most recent book is Edinburgh, a collaboration with Scottish landscape photographer Allan Wright, for which she wrote the introduction and a sequence of twenty-two poems (Allan Wright Photographic, 2019). A seasoned performer, she won a BAFTA Best Film Actress award for her role in Margaret Tait’s feature film Blue Black Permanent, and is the founder of Stellar Quines, Scotland’s leading women’s theatre company.