Carol McKay
A former librarian, Carol had a career switch in 2000 when she achieved an MLitt in Creative Writing. Her writing themes have always been identity, belonging, language, class, women’s issues and the restorative influence of the natural world. She has become increasingly curious and enthusiastic about geopoetics over the past ten years.
Carol’s prize-winning short stories and poems have been published in anthologies and magazines such as New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland, Gutter, Causeway/Cabhsair, Pushing Out the Boat, Wasafiri and Mslexia.
Her poetry pamphlet Reading the Landscape was published by Hedgehog Press in February 2022.
The Scottish Poetry Library named her poem ‘Ceilidh’ from that collection one of the twenty Best Scottish Poems in English in that year.
In 2024, Hedgehog Press published None of This Makes Any Sense: four poems and four asemic poems – a micro-pamphlet collaboration with her partner Keith McKay.
In 2025 her work was shortlisted in Wigtown’s 2025 Alastair Reid Poetry Pamphlet Prize.
She co-wrote the Scottish bestseller As I Lay Me Down To Sleep with Eileen Munro, published by Mainstream in 2008.
Carol was interviewed on BBC World Service about her ebook Second Chances: True Stories of Living With Addison’s Disease in 2013.
She was awarded the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2010
PotHole Press published her post-pandemic novel Incunabulum in 2020, and the crime novel White Spirit in 2022.
She taught creative writing through The Open University between 2004 and 2018.
Her website is https://carolmckay.co.uk
