In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Through poems about landscape and loss her third collection, Return by Minor Road, explores the lasting impact of being an ‘incoherent bystander’ to such an event.
Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, Williamson revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place:
'These small movements
towards the bracken
are to be reckoned with.'
Heidi Williamson is a poet, writing tutor and mentor, and an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She studied poetry and prose at the UEA and regularly teaches for arts and literature organisations in the UK. Her first collection, Electric Shadow, was supported by a grant from Arts Council England and was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry. Her second collection was inspired by being a printer’s daughter. The Print Museum received the EAW Book by the Cover’ Award and the 2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in literary journals in the UK, America and Australia and been translated into Polish, German, and Turkish. It has inspired poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at science and literary festivals in the UK and abroad. With a rootless lily held in front of him, a poem from her latest collection, won the 2019 Plough Prize.
