Christine De Luca
Christine De Luca
b. 1947, was born and brought up in Shetland, mainly in Waas (Walls). Lives in Edinburgh, where she is convener of the Shore Poets organisation. Her first poetry collection Voes & Sounds (1994) won the Shetland Literary Prize, as did Wast Wi Da Valkyries (1997). Other collections: Plain Song (2002) and Parallel Worlds (2005). She won the Prix du Livre insulaire 2007 for her bilingual poetry collection Mondes Parallèles. Her poems have twice won the Rhoda Bulter Prize for Shetland Dialect, in 2004 and 2006. The 2004 pamphlet Drops in Time’s Ocean is based on eight generations of her family. Her work is found in the New Shetlander and numerous literary journals, and has been translated into a number of languages. She has taken Shetland poetry to Italy, France, Finland and India. Christine is one of the founders of Hansel Cooperative Press. She has written some dialect stories for children for the CD A Hansel o Stories (2005), notably the stories of Smootie the cat, e.g. Smootie comes ta Lerrick, which also appeared in book form. She translated Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine into Shetland dialect as Dodie’s Phenomenal Pheesic (2008).
New poetry collection North End of Eden published by Luath Press in July 2010.
Latest adventure of Smootie da cat, Smootie an da Toon Hall Clock, published by Hansel in December 2010.
