The Good Dark

Ryan Van Winkle

Penned in the Margins

SALTIRE SOCIETY SCOTTISH POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNER

JUDGES COMMENTS
Ryan Van Winkle works with the language of love and love lost till it is scarcely recoverable but which still nourishes the lover’s past and present. His range is remarkable: everything invokes everything else, the tactile calls in the intellectual, one poem calls in every other
poem, mundane tasks call in whole physical and emotional worlds.

RYAN VAN WINKLE is a poet, live artist, podcaster and critic living in Edinburgh. His second collection, The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award. His poems have appeared in New Writing Scotland, The Prairie Schooner, The American Poetry Review, AGNI and Best Scottish Poems 2015. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship in 2012 and a residency at The Studios of Key West in 2016. As a member of Highlight Arts he has organized festivals and translation workshops in Syria, Pakistan and Iraq.