Novels, poems and polemics penned at home and abroad
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Based in Glasgow, Vagabond Voices is an independent publisher that is both Scottish and fervently European in its aims. Vagabond is committed to introducing new titles from Scottish authors and translating fiction from other languages. Our library reflects our aims to promote literary ambition and innovative writers, and to challenge readers.
Our latest translation by Uldis Balodis is being presented at the Andrejs Upīts Memorial Museum in one week's time - if you happen to be in Riga, do stop by! Otherwise, a tip of the hat to our kindred in translation across the continent 🇱🇻
More on the book here: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/changelings/gold
🔔📖 NEW BOOKS! We're publishing two translations in September. One is a Kafka-esque novella of an employee in a strange bank, a monstrosity of human make yet incomprehensible to human minds; the other is the tale of a poor family, raised by a twist of fate to great wealth and greater unhappiness.
Pre-orders are up - order now to get your books early!
CIRCULATION: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/changelings/circulation
GOLD: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/changelings/gold
📚 A slow morning with a consuming read. Find all our books, ebook and otherwise, on our website: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/
🌈 Happy Friday, everyone! It’s almost the weekend and what better way to unwind than with some poetry? HOUSE, HOWEVER is a collection of 62 poems that examines the elusive – each poem suggestive, rhythmic and intelligent.⠀
“In these poems – portraits of objects and emotions – Kathrine Sowerby animates a world we ignore, she reinvents a world with a compelling internal logic" –Gerry Loose
Read more here: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/poetry/house-however
Jenni Daiches' BORROWED TIME is an exercise in gratitude, exploring life's happiest, saddest and most mundane moments with equal measure.
Sonia leaves her Yorkshire home after her husband's death for a rundown railway carriage in the Scottish Highlands. With her 70th birthday approaching, she feels that she must make the most of life, and Scotland is where she feels she needs to be: here, she is the eccentric white-haired woman who lives with two dogs in a railway carriage. Here, she is an outsider, and is free to examine and reinvent herself.
Learn more here: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/vagabonds/borrowed-time
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2022, THE LAST WOMAN BORN ON THE ISLAND explores the past and the present of Scottish island life, from the legend of the White Cow to the HMS Iolaire disaster in 1919 to the knitting of Eriskay ganseys. What is the difference between the lost and the merely forgotten? Who is this last woman - where is her island? Now 20% off here: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/poetry/the-last-woman-born-on-the-island
Cover art by Mark Mechan, Red Axe Design.
Many starry nights ago we published Vicki Husband's THIS FAR BACK EVERYTHING SHIMMERS - an anthology that infuses the mundane with stellar significance, shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year 2016. More here: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/poetry/this-far-back-everything-shimmers 🌟⭐️✨
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(Excerpt from Extremely Large Telescope, p. 3).
💫It's ! To celebrate women in translation and women who translate, here's our Translated by Her book bundle with three books at 30% off. More here: https://buff.ly/3WM9ClC 🏷️
Judging a book by its cover sometimes makes sense, especially when you have a cover like this one - find out what's behind the cover of BLESSED ASSURANCE by Stewart Ennis, a Scottish novel woven around family, faith and grief (now 20% off only on our website!): https://buff.ly/4dfDeNs
An old favourite for 🇱🇹 ⠀
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WHITE SHROUD by Antanas Škėma (translated from Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis) is one of our most popular books, for good reason.
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The novel is considered by many as the most important Lithuanian work of modernist fiction. Drawing heavily on the author’s own refugee and immigrant experience, this psychological, stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of an émigré poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. The novel moves through sharply contrasting settings and stages in the narrator’s life in Lithuania before and during World War II, returning always to New York and the recent immigrant’s struggle to adapt to a completely different, and indifferent, modern world. Will he survive, or will we see his sanity fray, his self decay into madness?
Find out more here: https://buff.ly/4deE3Gn
📨 This just in - our latest newsletter is out as of yesterday, on Émile Zola and Les Rougon-Marquart! Read on for Allan Cameron's thoughts on this nineteenth-century book series, on its author's prejudices and incisive insight, and on a review of the series in the London Review of Books. (And discounts...) More here: https://buff.ly/46gZch1
Just some of the wonderful translated works we've had the pleasure to publish. From around the world and throughout the last century, explore them here: https://buff.ly/3XXgSMq
translatedfiction
A few poetry titles from our backlist! Used to be we'd do poetry for , but really any day is a good day for a poem. Any new titles or old favourites catch your eye?
More here: https://buff.ly/4buHiIA 📚
A Woman's War Against Progress is out now!
What might a hundred-year-old woman from a dying tribe have to say about progress? This is a novel of politics, but much more than that it is a novel about political activism: of what it means to save one's culture in a rapidly changing world, and how in trying to save one corner of the world, it is all too easy to lose oneself. More here: 📖 https://buff.ly/3VQhII9
"The land was made for the trees, and progress – human progress – is the unnatural force that tries so hard to break apart that sacred union. The land was made for the trees, which protect the land from greedy hands that would dig deeper and deeper into its flesh to extract not only the nutrients that belong to the trees and the plants, but also the toxins the earth has so carefully and judiciously hidden away where they can do no harm. Progress abhors an obstructed view. An empty landscape is transparent, and staring at its expanse man can feel that he owns it, knows it and can use it as though it were his own body." —Rahväema Ranavutavskaya, Allan Cameron's "A Woman's War Against Progress"
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This just in - Dr Margaret Tejerizo from the University of Glasgow has reviewed 'A Woman's War Against Progress' for the Bottle Imp! Read all about it here: https://buff.ly/3xEQ5K4
A Woman's War Against Progress is out now!
What might a hundred-year-old woman from a dying tribe have to say about modernity? This is a novel of politics, but much more than that it is a novel about political activism: of what it means to save one's culture and humanity in a rapidly changing world. Read more here: https://buff.ly/3xAFpw6
Former Makar of Scotland Liz Lochhead introduces our Scottish poetry anthology 'Be the First to Like This', published almost ten years ago. More here: https://buff.ly/3Xr4e87
with just some of our changelings. We've published books translated from all over the world, and what better way to travel on a budget than through a good book?
A little bit of poetry to brighten up your Wednesday. Our Scottish anthology 'Be the First to Like This' is almost ten years old now, and yet I can't say I've heard all that many people singing o' Google Scotland...!
More on the book here: https://buff.ly/3VxOayK
A little bit of poetry to brighten up your Tuesday. Here is a poem from our Scottish anthology Be the First to Like This. Have you read it? More here: https://buff.ly/4c2s0vQ
Allan Cameron's tribute to Gerry Loose (1948-2024), poet and cultural diplomat.
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It would be difficult to do justice to Gerry Loose’s multifaceted life which ended on the 30th of April leaving a huge gap in many fields, and I myself am certainly not expert enough to do justice to him, but I am going to try because he deserves our admiration. He was a poet and there is not doubt about that. I have the impression that he was a secular mystic, and I have no idea what he would think of this label; probably he would have liked it. Surely he was very engaged in cultural diplomacy on a global scale, and in this sphere he is probably irreplaceable – at least in Scotland.
For us the greatest example of this ability of his was the project that led to the publication of Mither Tongue, which included Denis Mair’s magnificent translation of three long poems by Jidi Majia. This in itself would have been an achievement, but Gerry took it one step further and had each poem translated into a different form of Scots. Jidi Majia is a great admirer of Hugh MacDiarmid, and a few decades ago he organised the commission of a bust to celebrate the twentieth-century Scottish poet which is displayed in a Chinese museum, and only now have we discovered this due to Gerry’s activity as a cultural intermediary.
Gerry was seventy-eight when he died and with his death not only did Scottish letters lose a great deal, but so did many other fields besides, as I have already described. But we should also celebrate the enviable positivity of his life which was a very full one and included his family life with partner Morven and their children. At his funeral, a friend provided the rich story of his life from the crematorium’s secular pulpit and it included some of his geographical searchings. Gerry himself said of his life that once hell was everywhere but later he understood that everywhere was a good place to be. I believe that the eulogy and his self-deprecation sit very well together. They reinforce each other rather than genuinely contradict. So much happens in any life, and Gerry’s was so much fuller than most.
From the VV blog archives: some musings on translating and translations. Read the rest here - https://buff.ly/3VrA6rN
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🔔 Today at 7pm in Glasgow will be remembering Helen Lamb, with readings from her writing and copies of her work. Instead of adding more words here is a poem by Chris Powici, Helen's partner and a poet: this is a companion piece to Helen's 'Spell of the Bridge', and a gentle, soft elegy for its author.
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April
Chris Powici
i.m. Helen Lamb
These things are happening now:
an April wind
rook nests swaying in the trees like dark bells
the thought of her, in the garden, watching.
Ferns tremble by the shed door.
Last night’s rain drips from the firethorn leaves.
All this brilliant shock of world
and the thought of her watching.
Everything now.
🔔 Tomorrow will be remembering Helen Lamb, but today we remember her through her words: here is 'Loch', exhibited at the FiLiA Women's Rights Conference in 2023. If you're in Glasgow and have a free evening tomorrow, stop by Waterstones for a moment of poetry and memory...
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Loch
Helen Lamb
I have my moods
vagary and whim flit across my surface
I am a looking glass for the sky
a cradle for mountainous shadows
sometimes wind ruffled
but deep down untroubled.
I tolerate
dabbling in my shadows.
Throw stones and I spit back.
You want to come a little deeper?
Be warned. I'll not be held responsible
for what you can't see.
And I'm greedy
guzzling the white gush
gulping up broad slothful waters
which have lost their way
and every mean and measly trickle
that approaches me.
It's not enough
to be just a pretty sight
I want to burst
from this hollowed bed
it constrains me too neatly.
I want a flood.
I've learned to wait
evaporate my substance
little by frittering little
still sometimes I ripple
with the shivering delight
of my existence.
🔔 If you're in Glasgow in two days' time, we will be remembering Helen Lamb at Waterstones Byres Road. How better to remember a person than through their words? Here is 'Spell of the Bridge', one of two poems by Helen that have since become National Poetry Day postcards.
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Spell of the Bridge
Helen Lamb
Hold the wish on your tongue
As you cross
What the bridge cannot hear
Cannot fall
For the river would carry
Your hopes to the sea
To the net of a stranger
To the silt bed of dreams
Hold the wish on your tongue
As you cross
And on the far side
Let the wish go first
We have just learnt the sad news of Gerry Loose's passing.
Vagabond Voices had the honour of publishing two of Loose's poetry collections, fault line (2014) and night exposures (2018), but Loose was far more than a poet. He was a gardener, a garden designer, and a slow-moving nomad: he lived in England, Ireland, Spain and Morocco before coming to rest in Scotland. Though his own writing gathered many accolades, from the Creative Scotland Award and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship to the Kooneen Säätiö Award, we remember him most for his work bringing others' writing to the world. Loose had a presence in poetry circles from Scotland to Spain and even China: our translation of Jidi Majia's Mither Tongue (2021) would have been impossible without him.
In his own words, speaking in Spanish at the International Festival of Poetry at Medellín: 'Es la poesía la que puede construir puentes, no muros' - 'poetry is what builds bridges, not walls'.
That is how we will remember him first and foremost, as a bridge built between worlds.
1948-2024
Join us a week today at to remember the life and works of Helen Lamb. Helen and her novel Three Kinds of Kissing are near and dear to us at Vagabond Voices, and though Helen is sadly no longer with us, copies of her work will be available at Waterstones on the 30th. If you’re in Glasgow then, stop by and let Waterstones know on their Eventbrite page – link here: https://buff.ly/44TrOfs 📖
🗓️ WHEN?: Thursday 30th May @ 7pm
📍WHERE?: Waterstones, 351-355 Byres Road, Glasgow G12 8AU
Friends, Readers, Vagabonds! Have you signed up to our newsletter? Our latest essays include a review of Halldór Laxness’s Fish Can Sing, reflections on the nature of childhood, and a guest essay from novelist Tracey Emerson on how through writing those no longer with us can still be heard.
Sign up here, at https://buff.ly/3wHf1QI - you'll get monthly(-ish) essays straight to your inbox, for a slow, insightful read.
🔔 A story of burnt air, bloodshot eyes, empty spaces where friends used to be: that is how we remember Helen Lamb's 'Three Kinds of Kissing'. Helen passed away in 2017 before we published her novel, but join us and in two weeks' time to celebrate her life and her works - if you're in Glasgow on the 30th and will be stopping by, let Waterstones know here: https://buff.ly/4amXwmk 📖
🗓️WHEN? Thursday 30th May at 7pm
📍WHERE? Waterstones, 351-355 Byres Road, Glasgow G12 8AU
A classic novel for 🇱🇹 — WHITE SHROUD by Antanas Škėma (translated from Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis), considered by many to be the most important work of modernist fiction in Lithuanian. Read more about it below, or find the novel here: https://buff.ly/3wtEs8o
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The novel draws on the author’s own refugee and immigrant experience, in a psychological, stream-of-consciousness story of an émigré poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel in the 1950s. ⠀
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Gruodis' translation draws the reader into a culturally and historically specific world to explore universal themes of selfhood, alienation, creativity and cultural difference. ⠀⠀
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WHITE SHROUD is one of our most popular books, and for good reason. Find it with free delivery on our website (link in bio).
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🔔📖 NEW BOOKS! We're publishing two translations in September. One is a Kafka-esque novella of an employee in a strange bank, a monstrosity of human make yet incomprehensible to human minds; the other is the tale of a poor family, raised by a twist of fate to great wealth and greater unhappiness. Pre-orders are up - order now to get your books early! CIRCULATION: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/changelings/circulation GOLD: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/changelings/gold
📨 This just in - our latest newsletter is out as of yesterday, on Émile Zola and Les Rougon-Marquart! Read on for Allan Cameron's thoughts on this nineteenth-century book series, on its author's prejudices and incisive insight, and on a review of the series in the London Review of Books. (And discounts...) More here: https://buff.ly/46gZch1 #VagabondVoices #IndiePublishing #IndependentPublishing #ScottishPublishing #ScottishPublisher #TranslationPublishing #BooksInTranslation #BookCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Bookish #BookRecommendations #LiteraryNewsletter #Essays #LiteraryEssays
This just in - Dr Margaret Tejerizo from the University of Glasgow has reviewed 'A Woman's War Against Progress' for the Bottle Imp! Read all about it here: https://buff.ly/3xEQ5K4 #VagabondVoices #IndiePublishing #IndependentPublishing #ScottishPublishing #ScottishPublisher #GlasgowPublishing #GlasgowPublisher #Translation #BookCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Bookish #BookRecommendations #ScottishWriting #ScottishLiterature #ScottishBooks
🔔 Today at 7pm @waterstones_byresrd in Glasgow will be remembering Helen Lamb, with readings from her writing and copies of her work. Instead of adding more words here is a poem by Chris Powici, Helen's partner and a poet: this is a companion piece to Helen's 'Spell of the Bridge', and a gentle, soft elegy for its author. —————— April Chris Powici i.m. Helen Lamb These things are happening now: an April wind rook nests swaying in the trees like dark bells the thought of her, in the garden, watching. Ferns tremble by the shed door. Last night’s rain drips from the firethorn leaves. All this brilliant shock of world and the thought of her watching. Everything now. #bookevent #glasgow #glasgowbookevent #scottishpublishing #vagabondvoices #indiepublishing #independentpublisher #waterstones #VagabondVoices #GlasgowPublishing #GlasgowPublisher #BookCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Bookish #BookRecommendations #ThreeKindsofKissing #HelenLamb #ScottishWriting #ScottishBooks
🔔 Tomorrow @waterstones_byresrd will be remembering Helen Lamb, but today we remember her through her words: here is 'Loch', exhibited at the FiLiA Women's Rights Conference in 2023. If you're in Glasgow and have a free evening tomorrow, stop by Waterstones for a moment of poetry and memory... —————— Loch Helen Lamb I have my moods vagary and whim flit across my surface I am a looking glass for the sky a cradle for mountainous shadows sometimes wind ruffled but deep down untroubled. I tolerate dabbling in my shadows. Throw stones and I spit back. You want to come a little deeper? Be warned. I'll not be held responsible for what you can't see. And I'm greedy guzzling the white gush gulping up broad slothful waters which have lost their way and every mean and measly trickle that approaches me. It's not enough to be just a pretty sight I want to burst from this hollowed bed it constrains me too neatly. I want a flood. I've learned to wait evaporate my substance little by frittering little still sometimes I ripple with the shivering delight of my existence. #bookevent #glasgow #glasgowbookevent #scottishpublishing #vagabondvoices #indiepublishing #independentpublisher #waterstones #VagabondVoices #GlasgowPublishing #GlasgowPublisher #BookCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Bookish #BookRecommendations #ThreeKindsofKissing #HelenLamb #ScottishWriting #ScottishBooks
🔔 If you're in Glasgow in two days' time, we will be remembering Helen Lamb at Waterstones Byres Road. How better to remember a person than through their words? Here is 'Spell of the Bridge', one of two poems by Helen that have since become National Poetry Day postcards. —————— Spell of the Bridge Helen Lamb Hold the wish on your tongue As you cross What the bridge cannot hear Cannot fall For the river would carry Your hopes to the sea To the net of a stranger To the silt bed of dreams Hold the wish on your tongue As you cross And on the far side Let the wish go first #bookevent #glasgow #glasgowbookevent #scottishpublishing #vagabondvoices #indiepublishing #independentpublisher #waterstones #VagabondVoices #GlasgowPublishing #GlasgowPublisher #BookCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Bookish #BookRecommendations #ThreeKindsofKissing #HelenLamb #ScottishWriting #ScottishBooks
Good morning, everyone! It is the weekend! What are you up to? I am going to tidy up a bit and then spend my time on the sofa with the cat and the brilliant Overstory by Richard Powers. I am 1/3 into the book and so far loving it. What are you reading?
Good morning, everyone! A brand new week and the bookshops are opening their doors across England and Wales. Lots of good luck to the brilliant booksellers today! I hope your customers are lovely and understanding. I can't wait to see what books everyone is getting today.🎉📚
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Based in Glasgow, Vagabond Voices is an independent publisher that is both Scottish and fervently European in its aims. Vagabond is committed to introducing new titles from Scottish authors and translating fiction from other languages. Our library reflects our aims to promote literary ambition and innovative writers, and to challenge readers. Founder of the new Think in Translation podcast. Please head over to our site to have a listen!
