Meaghan Delahunt's 'Artist & Nationality'
In ‘The Artist and Nationality’ Saltire Award-winning writer, Meaghan Delahunt, reflects on her own sense of nationality and what that may mean for an artist.
A powerful and moving account that embraces the personal and political, this essay confronts the truth of Delahunt’s experience as an accidental immigrant to Scotland.
As Meaghan says in the essay;
‘It is not the responsibility of the artist to present a comfortable or ‘identifiable’ picture of the nation in which they were born or in which they live and they should be free to write about whatever they see fit in whatever language they see fit.’
Meaghan Delahunt is a novelist and short story writer. Her work has been widely translated and her stories anthologised and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 1997 she won the Flamingo/HQ National Short Story Prize in Australia. Awards for her novels In the Blue House (Bloomsbury,2001), The Red Book (Granta, 2008) and To the Island (Granta, 2011) include a regional Commonwealth Prize, a Saltire First Book Prize and a nomination for the Orange Prize. She taught Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews from 2005-2013 and now teaches at the University of Stirling. Born in Melbourne, Meaghan Delahunt has lived in Edinburgh since 1992.
Meaghan is author of the second in the Saltire Series of pamphlets. The Artist and Nationality sees Saltire Award winner Meaghan Delahunt reflect on her own sense of nationality and what that may mean for the artist.
Pamphlet costs: Members £4, Non-Members £5