Wed 21 Feb, 2.00-3.00pm
Seamus Heaney Centre Seminar Room (entrance at 48 University Road)

Professor David Wheatley is a poet and critic at the University of Aberdeen. David’s latest book, Child Ballad (Carcanet, 2023) explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Conducting his children through landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and by wolves. He maps a rich territory of rivers, trees and mountains. Writing across geographical and historical distances, alert to questions of memory and loss, communicating the ache of the here and now, Wheatley sees through the eyes of young children and the world looks very different in its gifts and threats.

Child Ballad was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year. David is the author of six collections of poetry and a novel and he co-edited with Ailbhe Darcy The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He has also published widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, Irish literature and Samuel Beckett. David is now writing a novel about a woman who lives between the walls of a Scottish castle and thinks she is Bonnie Prince Charlie.