RAB WILSON is an award-winning poet who is a previous winner of the McCash Prize for Poetry, has held past writing fellowship posts; Robert Burns Writing Fellow for Dumfries and Galloway; James Hogg Writer in Residence in Ettrick Valley, and Scots Scriever at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. In 2023 he was awarded an Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Award for his work in Arts & Humanities in Scotland. He was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. As a Scots poet, his work appears regularly in The Herald, Chapman, Lallans and Markings magazines and he is the author of several highly praised volumes of poetry and a Burns scholar.