A4_DCSDC_USLW_Programme_2024V1

aye nearhan
A short film featuring
Anne McMaster
Available online from
Monday 25 November 2024
at www.derrystrabane.com/ulsterscots
‘aye nearhan’ focuses on our wonderful natural environment, combining an original
Ulster-Scots narrative with extraordinary drone footage of the NI landscape and
coastline. Anne’s words will also be combined with a bespoke original soundtrack
from local composer Matthew McCracken. In a world that is gradually disconnecting
from the seasons and the natural world, we often take our stunning coastlines and
landscape for granted. In ‘aye nearhan’, Anne will use the beautifully descriptive
Ulster-Scots language to great effect – reminding our own island-based audiences
of the beauty that surrounds us - while showing audiences from further afield the
beauty of both our language and our landscape.
This 13-minute film will be made available to DCSDC as a digital upload
prior to Leid Week 2024.
Anne McMaster
Anne has produced two poetry collections in English - Walking Off the Land and
Moments (published by Hedgehog Poetry Press) while Póames - poetry in Ulster
Scots - was published by the Ulster Scots Agency and Ulster Scots Community
Network. Martha And the Vardo – a YA magical realism novella – was published in
June 2024 while Ma Shinin Star – lullabies in Ulster-Scots – will be published in
November 2024. Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area (her next collection of work
in English) is due to be published in early 2025. Anne has already created two short
films for DCSDC’s Leid Week – The Words We Carry (2022) and
The Queen o’Wuntèr (2023).
Kenspeckle Kythins
A short film
featuring Alan Millar
Available online from
Monday 25 November 2024
at www.derrystrabane.com/ulsterscots
In this short film, a companion piece to the Island Voices lecture Hame an awa
– Scots wurds in Irish toonlands, Millar explores the interconnections of locality
and language running through his own work, using as his touchstone the
glossary and subscribers list of Newton-Cunningham poet George Dugall’s The
Northern Cottage, published exactly 200 years ago this year. The glossary, filled
with Ulster-Scots dialect still spoken today, is layered through with many words
now lost to the Laggan, but still alive in other places, creating a sense of shared
Scots language, running past into present, between Errigal and the Shetlands.
The subscribers list teems with Irish townland names, as intimately recognisable
today as the day the book was printed. The short film features contributions from
contemporary Scots poets William Hershaw and George Watt, as well as a poem
especially written by Millar. Join Alan on his journey through his native Laggan,
connecting modern resonances with those of the past.
Alan Millar
Alan Millar comes from the Laggan area of east Donegal and is now based in
Ballymoney, Co Antrim. He is a journalist, writer and poet in Ulster-Scots and
English. In 2021 he was winner of the Hugh MacDiarmid Tassie for Scots poetry
and the inaugural Linenhall Library Ulster-Scots short story competition. In
2023 Alan was winner of the Linenhall Library Ulster-Scots poetry competition
and had a top-placed Ulster-Scots poem in the inaugural Thomas Carnduff
Shipyard Poetry Competition. The author writes an Ulster-Scots column for the
Ballymoney Chronicle called ‘Leid Loanen’, or Language Lane. His first collection
of poetry ‘Echas frae tha Big Swilly Swally’ was published in May 2023. He was
nominated for Scots Writer of the Year, in the 2023 Scots Language Awards and
is currently working on his ACNI-supported second poetry collection, ‘Frae Erris
tae Wrath’.