Kirkcudbright Poet Awarded Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship
This week the Scottish Book Trust announced the four Robert Louis Stevenson Fellows for 2014, including Kirkcudbright based poet Stuart A Paterson and Dumfries based Tom Pow to be based in Grez-sur-Loing in France.
The Fellowships, supported by Creative Scotland’s Creative Futures fund, were initiated in 1994 by Franki Fewkes, a Scottish enthusiast then living in France. As well as giving writers a chance to escape the hustle and bustle of their everyday lives to devote time to their writing, Fewkes intended it to be an opportunity for the Fellows to meet other artists and to absorb new cultural and social influences.
Stuart Paterson

Commenting on the Fellowship, Paterson said:
“I was completely surprised & delighted when told I'd been awarded one of this year's Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowships. It's a real privilege to be given the opportunity of visiting & living in a place so admired by & inspiring to Stevenson, who's one of those rare writers we all grew up reading & hearing about, as novelist, poet & traveller. Like my fellow countyman Burns, he's one of those Scottish figures I consider to be a constant influence on my own work & to whom most writers since definitely owe a debt. I look forward to following in his footsteps just a little bit, for as he himself said, ‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.’”
Tom Pow

Tom says:
"The fellowship offers the opportunity to think through and to work on a project on narrative poetry which has been on my mind for a considerable time. I also like to think there is some indefinable benefit resting and working in the shadow of a writer I have both loved and written about."
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