Christine De Luca

Christine De Luca

Christine De Luca, née Pearson, (born April 8, 1947) is one of the foremost contemporary poets in Scotland. Her work has appeared in journals worldwide and she has read at many literary festivals, both in the UK and abroad. She grew up in Waas (Walls) in Shetland, the daughter of the headmaster of Happyhansel School, Sandy Pearson. After studying in Edinburgh, De Luca worked in education for many years. She now lives in Edinburgh.
In 1996 she won the Shetland Literary Prize with her first poetry collection 'Voes & Sounds'. In 1999 her second collection 'Wast Wi Da Valkyries' also won the Shetland prize (since discontinued). A third collection, 'Plain Song', was launched in Shetland and Edinburgh in 2002. It is accompanied by a CD of the poems read by the author. These three collections were published by The Shetland Library.
The pamphlet, Drops in Time's Ocean, published by Hansel Co-operative Press in 2004, is based on eight generations of De Luca's family, on her father's side which hails from Vidlin in Lunnasting. The Hansel Cooperative has also produced some of De Luca's stories for children on a CD, along with the work of John Cumming, Iris Sandison and Jane Moncrieff. More recently she has also published several children's classics in translation, including work by Roald Dahl and Julia Donaldson.
'Parallel Worlds' and 'North End of Eden' were published by Luath Press, Edinburgh in 2005 and 2010 respectively. One of the poems in this collection, Makkin Sooth Eshaness, won the Rhoda Butler Prize for Shetland Dialect, 2004. The Shetland Writing Prize is awarded annually for a particular genre of writing. In 2006 it was awarded for poetry. De Luca's poem 'Seein Baith Sides' won the overall prize and also the prize for best poem in Shetland Dialect.
More recently Mariscat has published 'Dat Trickster Sun' which was short-listed for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2014. She is also the author of the novel 'And then forever', published by The Shetland Times in 2011.
Her poems have been selected four times as part of the Scottish Poetry Library's 20 best poems of the year and she is a frequent guest poet at Scottish poetry festivals and events.
De Luca's work has been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Polish, Austrian-German, French, Italian, Welsh and even English. She has taken part in many poetry events in France, but also in Canada, Finland, Poland,and Russia.
A bi-lingual volume of her poetry was published in 2007: Mondes Parallèles: Poèmes des Iles Shetland Édition Bilingue. It is a selection from her first four collections and newer work, translated by Jean-Paul Blot and published by éditions fédérop. In 2007, this volume won the prize for poetry at the 9th Salon International du Livre Insulaire in Ouessant. In 2015 Trauben published Questo sole furfante, a bi-lingual version of Dat Trickster Sun with Italian translations by Francesca Romana Paci. In 2015 she read poems at a conference at Rome university; in 2016 she participated in Ottobre in Poesia in Sardinia and in 2017 in Poetry Vicenza. In September 2017 she will be taking part in a poetry festival in Iceland.
She is Edinburgh's Makar, or poet laureate, (2014 -2017).