Kenneth Steven, Poet and Author

Kenneth Steven was born in Glasgow in 1968. He moved to Highland Perthshire in 1976 and has spent the bulk of his adult life there; it is the landscape and people of
northern Scotland that have proved the inspiration for a great percentage of his poetry and prose. He has spent two college years in Norway and is a fluent speaker of both major Norwegian dialects.

In 2002 he was commissioned to translate Lars Saabye
Christensen’s novel ‘The Half Brother’ for Arcadia Books in London. This work, which won the Nordic Prize for Literature in 2001, has already sold over 200,000 copies
worldwide. During his second year in the country he studied the history and culture of the Sami or Lapp people of Arctic Scandinavia, and subsequently has come to be involved in lecturing on the Sami to create
greater awareness of their struggle for survival and political / cultural rights. He has also translated the poetry of several Sami writers past and present.

Kenneth has been awarded two Bursaries by the Scottish Arts Council. He has won a Hawthornden Fellowship and for many years he has been a finalist in the Scottish
International Open Poetry Competition. His writing has been translated into and published in Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, German, Dutch, Slovenian and Korean. In
the spring of 2000 he was invited to read at Schloss Elrnau in Bavaria, a venue internationally renowned for its arts programme and guests over the years.

In 2002 he was awarded a place at Le Chateau Dc Lavigny, an international writing retreat beside Lake Geneva. He has been invited to read in New Jersey and North Carolina in the Autumn of 2003, and a tour of
Austrian universities is being planned. Two of his novels have been nominated for British fiction awards and two of his poems nominated for the coveted Forward Prize. In
1999 he was appointed to be Scotland’s first ever Reader in Residence, and Duff House invited him to be their Writer in Residence in 2000. He has participated in the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Aberdeen
Word Festival, and both the Exeter and Tavistock Festivals. He took part in the Greenbelt Festival at Cheltenham in 2002. He has read alongside top British poets Robert Crawford, Martin Crucefix, Sophie Hannah, Kathleen Jamie, and Don Paterson and has conducted readings from his work and talks on creative writing all across the country.

Schools, Colleges and Writers' Groups

Kenneth undertakes numerous visits to primary schools up and down the country. As a children’s author he conducts storytelling sessions for the three youngest
classes, and imagination workshops for older children to encourage their awareness of creativity, particularly in relation to the natural environment. He regularly visits secondary schools, having a long-standing and very warm connection with Glenalmond College in particular, and with a wide range of other independent and state secondaries across the country. On several occasions he has acted as writer in residence for schools. Whole
day visits have been undertaken, as have lunch-time readings for interested pupil groups. As a consultant on creative writing Kenneth is more than willing to evaluate the work of individual pupils beforehand in order to offer them one-to-one feedback during the course of the visit to the school.

In 1998 he set up a creative writing group within HMP Perth and in the winter of that year the group performed Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In Aberdeen he has established a poetry group and has been instrumental too in setting up both writing and reading groups in the city. In 1998 he was commissioned to produce a handbook for poets on the whole business of getting into print. This was followed in 2000 by a further handbook, this time on the composition of poems themselves. On the strength of these two publications Kenneth Steven has been invited to undertake numerous talks and workshops for writers groups, students and interested general audiences on the whole area of writing and publishing poetry.

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