Janice Galloway
1955-
Writer, Librettist
Janice Galloway (born in Saltcoats, Scotland) is a writer of novels, short stories, prose-poetry, non-fiction and libretti. She studied Music and English at Glasgow University, then worked as a school teacher for ten years before turning to writing.
She was the first Scottish Arts Council writer in residence to four prisons (HMPs Cornton Vale, Dungavel, Barlinnie and Polmont YOI) and was the Times Literary Supplement Research Fellow to the British Library in 1999. Her awards include: MIND/Allan Lane Award (for The Trick is to Keep Breathing), the McVitie's Prize (for Foreign Parts), the E.M. Forster Award (presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Creative Scotland Award, Saltire Book of the Year (for Clara) and the SMIT non-fiction Book of the Year for This is not about Me.
She has written and presented three radio series for BBC Scotland (Life as a Man, Imagined Lives and Chopin's Scottish Swansong) and works extensively with musicians and visual artists including Sally Beamish, Anne Bevan, Michael Wolchover, Norman McBeath and Alasdair Nocolson. Her books Clara andThis is Not About Me were recorded for the RNIB Talking Books service by the author in 2004 and 2009 respectively.
In December 2008 she was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3.
Galloway wrote the glosses on Bronte's Shirley and Eliot's Felix Holt and Middlemarch in The Book of Prefaces, edited by Alasdair Gray.
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