Guest Performers

Performers who have appeared with the Blue Salt Collective

Mhairi Allan

Mhairi Allan is an Aberdeen based performer, dance tutor and choreographer with a background in contemporary dance. She has worked with many diverse groups of dancers of various ages and abilities in both a community and professional context. Recent work has been as performer in Sweet Love with Janis Claxton Dance at the CCA in Glasgow.

Previous collaborations with the Blue Salt Collective have inspired and stimulated her love of poetry and music and continue to fuel her passion for choreographic ideas.

Bernard Briggs

Bernard Briggs has been writing poetry for over thirty-five years. His debut collection of poetry Love, Cry and Wonder Why was published by Cauliay in 2007 and was nominated for the Costa book awards the following year.

John Glenday

John Glenday was born in 1952 and currently works as an addictions counsellor with NHS Highland.

He is the author of two collections: The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; and Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Poems have been anthologised in the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry (Faber and Faber, 1992); The Firebox (Picador, 1998); and New British Poetry (Grey Wolf Press, 2004).

He was appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow for 1990/91, based at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Douglas W. Gray

Douglas W Gray lives in Cove Bay; founder member of the Dead Good Poets, former editor of poetry magazines Storm and Spume, published widely. Awards include: second prize in the Northwords Open Poetry Competiton 1998, first prize in the Feile Filiochta Open Poetry Competiton and the Irish Times Perpetual Trophy 2001, second placed in the Scottish International Poetry Competition 2003, and winner of the Ayr 800 Open Poetry Competition 2005.

David Liddell

Painter and musician David Liddell, based in Angus, was born in Liverpool in 1961. David's artistic output at the moment is concerned with landscapes and subterranean strangeness of the remembered place. The uninvited connections between mind, dream memory and experience. David likes to feel that artwork is an examination of this process, not the memory or place in itself, but the wish to revisit. Working with the Blue Salt Collective provides David with the opportunity to combine samples and voice to create soundscapes that echo the poetry's otherworldliness.

Helen Elizabeth Ramsey

Helen Elizabeth Ramsey is presently lurching from crisis to crisis and becoming scattier by the day. She is hoping that when the dust settles (literally) at home, and her sense of humour kicks in, the sagas of the last six months will provide oodles of new material. At the moment she is looking back at her time spent working in the woods and walking the tightrope between autobiography and fiction.

Judith Taylor

Judith Taylor has performed previously at StAnza and at the Durham Book Festival and her poetry has appeared in a number of magazines. Her first collection Earthlight (Koo Press) was published in 2006; her second Local Colour by Calder Wood Press in 2010.

Rapunzel Wizard

Rapunzel Wizard writes and performs sharply comic poetry with a political edge, along with prose, plays and songs. He has appeared at numerous festivals around the country and has self published three books; three CDs of comic verse and runs workshops for schools and writers' groups.