Online Zoom Forum: Edwin Muir: The Spiritual, Ecological, and Community Vision in his Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 21 May 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Simon Barrow:
Bio: Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator, educator and researcher with wide experience in politics, public issues, media, organisational change, ethics and religion/beliefs. He was director of the think-tank Ekklesia from 2005-2024. His book Britain Needs Change: The Politics of Hope and Labour's Challenge, co-edited with Gerry Hassan, was published by Biteback in November 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum, January 2025) and will be followed by Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story (Ekklesia Publishing, September 2025).
Speakers:
Dr Donald Smith:
Title: Myth Work: Edwin Muir in Poetry and Prophecy.
Description: Muir’s powerful poems resonate now in unpredictable ways - how and why?
Bio: Donald Smith is founding Director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre and of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival.
Donald Smith is a noted storyteller and performance poet in his own right, novelist, and playwright; and has authored a succession of books about Scottish culture, including Storytelling Scotland (2001) and Freedom and Faith (2013).
From 2012 to 2023 he was CEO of TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland).
Donald was born in Glasgow to an Irish mother, and was brought up in Church of Scotland manses in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling.
In 2023 he was honoured to receive the Hamish Henderson Award for lifetime achievement.
Geraldine Coleman:
Title: Edwin Muir's Poor Tom: An Emerging View of Class, Community, and Chips!!!
Description: Edwin Muir’s Poor Tom was first published in 1932. It sold only 80 copies and was not universally held as a success yet examining it today we can see the novel holding up an image of Glasgow in the early twentieth century through the behaviours, social interaction and class observations of the characters. In Chapter 8, we are invited to take a walk down Eglinton Street amongst a community of characters and sensory assaults that Mansie Manson encounters. This vision of a community living and working on the south side of Glasgow not only provides a reflection of Muir’s own emerging political views but a toe dip into his every changing spiritual life.
Bio: Geraldine Coleman is a postgraduate at the University of Glasgow currently working towards an MPhil (Research) in Scottish Literature examining the work of Edwin Muir, and his relationship with Glasgow, through his novel Poor Tom. After careers that included childcare management, investment banking and work in the service industry, she graduated in June 2023 with an MA (Hons) in Scottish Literature and is a former President, and Vice President, of the University of Glasgow, Scottish Literature Society.
Prof Catriona MacLeod:
Title: Edwin Muir’s Languages.
Description: Edwin Muir publicly championed the complete assimilation, even digestion, of the Scottish author into standard English, but in his and Willa Muir’s memoirs, notebooks, criticism, and, last but not least, in their intimate relationship with one another, Scottish dialects constitute another, potent and recurrent, if hidden poetic language.
Bio: Catriona MacLeod is Senior Advisor to the Provost for the Arts, Deputy Dean in the Division of the Humanities, and Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the College and the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She has published widely on German literature and visual culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and has written on Edwin and Willa Muir’s Kafka translations.
Prof Andrew Hadfield:
Bio: I have taught a variety of undergraduate courses throughout my career at the Universities of Leeds, Ulster, Aberystwyth, Columbia (New York), and Sussex, concentrating on medieval and early modern literature, Irish literature, literary theory and some twentieth-century literature. I have also taught M. A. courses on Spenser; literature, travel writing and colonialism; and Shakespeare. I have also been a visiting professor at the University of Granada (Spain) since 2007 and I am a fellow of the British Academy and the English Association.
Prof Charles Sabatos:
Title: Edwin and Willa Muir in Prague and Other Scottish-Czech Literary Links.
Description: Most famous for their translations of Franz Kafka, Edwin and Willa Muir never met Prague’s most famous writer, but his native city played a significant role in their lives due to two periods they spent there in the 1920s and 1940s. The optimistic outlook of Czechoslovakia as a newly independent nation gave Edwin Muir hope for Scotland’s greater freedom in the future, but he later had first-hand experience of the country’s postwar descent into totalitarianism. Drawing on the work of Margery Palmer McCulloch and other scholars, I will discuss the role that Czech culture and society played in shaping the uniquely cosmopolitan perspective of both Edwin and Willa Muir, as well as its influence on other Scottish writers who lived in Central Europe.
Bio: Charles Sabatos is a professor of literature at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. He is the author of Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature (2020).
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Cost: By Donation:
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
If you are having a difficulty paying by Paypal, then you can pay by bank transfer instead.
NB: you must also email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so we can send you the Zoom sign-in details.
Here are the bank transfer details:
Account Name: Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace
Bank: Bank of Scotland
Bank Address: Edinburgh Royal Mile Branch
Account Number: 06131159
Sort Code: 802000
Some international transfers also ask for an IBAN number:
The IBAN number:
GB70 BOFS 8020 0006 1311 59
BIC:
BOFSGB21168