Letting Go: A Timeline of Tales

By Gerda Stevenson

The twelve stories in Letting Go take us on a journey through landscape, language and turbulent times, from the mid-19th century to the present day, and into the future. Stevenson’s array of characters from many walks of life and nationalities – including a traveller, a wood carver, chicken farm workers, a nurse, an architect and a magician – meet and part, some becoming reacquainted.

Themes exploring identity, creativity and the environment, echo and connect throughout the different narratives, sometimes carried in snatches of song. The author leads us outward from her native Scottish Borders to Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Gàidhealtachd, south to England, across the Atlantic to Apartheid South Africa and, finally, to the melting Arctic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781804250075

Gerda Stevenson

Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning writer, actor, theatre, director and singer-songwriter. She has worked on stage, television, radio, film and in opera, throughout the UK and abroad, and is a recipient of Scottish Arts Council and Creative Scotland writers' bursaries. Her stage play. Federer versus Murray, directed by the author, toured to New York in 2012, and was published there by Salmagundi. In 2014 she was nominated as Scots Singer of the Year for the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards, following the launch of an album of her own songs Night Touches Day. She has written extensively for radio, including original plays and dramatisations of Scottish novels. Her poetry collections If This Were Real (Smokestack Books 2013) and Quines: Poems in Tribute to Women of Scotland (Luath Press, 1st edition 2018, 2nd edition 2020) have been published in Rome by Edizioni Ensemble in Italian translations by Laura Maniero, 2017 and 2021, respectively. She wrote the biographical introduction and a series of poems for the book Inside & Out: The Art of Christian Small, (Scotland Street Press, 2019). She collaborated with Scottish landscape photographer Allan Wright on their book Edinburgh, for which she wrote the introduction and a sequence of twenty-two poems (Allan Wright Photographic, 2019). In 2021, she directed a film of George Mackay Brown's play The Storm Watchers, for the St Magnus International Festival. A seasoned performer, she won a BAFTA Best Film Actress award for her role in Margaret Tait's feature film Blue Black Permanent, and is the founder of Stellar Quines, Scotland's leading women's theatre company.