R.M. Murray
R.M. Murray is the Saltire Prizeβwinning author of Bleak: The Mundane Comedy, and is Head of Visual Art & Literature at An Lanntair arts centre in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, where he grew up. He studied in Aberdeen and then at the Glasgow School of Art, where he was in a punk band with Peter Capaldi and Craig Ferguson. He subsequently returned to Lewis and has worked in arts and literature throughout his career.
Cianalas
by R.M. Murray
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Cianalas: the Gaelic for homesickness, with added melancholy and nostalgia. A yearning for the hearth. An ache to return.
R.M. Murray paints a portrait of life on Lewis and Harris in a collection that is spare, deadpan, unvarnished as the land that has shaped him. His series of evocative vignettes peels back the postcard myth of the Hebrides to reveal something truer, more human β capturing island life in all its contradictions. This is not the curated Hebrides of lonely crofts and empty moorland, but a living, working landscape: council estates and supermarkets, industry and hardship, memory and change. A vividly rendered collection of distinctive smells and sounds, gales, foghorns, bog and rock, machair, white sands and aquamarine seas.
Lyrical, unsentimental, often funny, Murrayβs pieces offer an original and fresh kaleidoscope of a place and community too often flattened into clicheΜ. Laced with affection they may be, but thereβs no sugar.
Prizes and awards
Winner: Scotland's National Book Awards: First Book of the Year, 2021
