A former guidance teacher has won the top prize of £750 in this year's James McCash Scots Poetry Competition, run jointly by The Herald and Glasgow University.
Sheila Templeton's entry was chosen by the five judges, headed by Edwin Morgan, Scotland's poet laureate, as the best response to the competition theme "This is my own, my native land". Sir Walter Scott's celebrated line from The Lay of the Last Minstrel had itself been selected as an appropriate challenge to poets on the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Union.
The winning poem, called My Land, offers a series of images of Scotland, terse but immensely lyrical; it hints, too, at darker aspects of the national character.
Ms Templeton, born in Aberdeen but now living in Ayrshire, is a graduate of Aberdeen University and spent most of her earlier professional life in Edinburgh and the Lothians, first as a history teacher and latterly as a principal guidance teacher.
Having taken early retirement in 1993, just after her 50th birthday, she was first published in 1998 in New Writing Scotland and has become an accomplished public performer.
Ms Templeton has featured before in the McCash prize list, though not as first-prize winner. In what is turning into a vintage year, she also recently won the Robert McLellan Poetry Award.
She said of her north-east background: "Lots of my poems in Scots are very flavoured by Doric." Now that she lives beside the sea in Troon, her poem also reflects her western perspectives.
The second prize of £350 went to William Hershaw, a principal teacher of English from Fife, while Andrew McCallum came third, winning £200.
Poetry aficionados are invited to an open celebratory evening for the McCash Competition. It will be held in the Scottish Literature Department of Glasgow University, 7 University Gardens, at 7pm on Thursday, November 1. All are welcome.
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