Brigid Lowe
Brigid Lowe grew up in remote Wales, where lessons were bible stories, folk tales and immaculate cursive writing. The first two stuck. She speaks Welsh, though her parents are Irish and she now lives with her children and their phones in Scotland, a nation that has warmly adopted her, in a towerblock on the edge of a wood half way up a mountain, with a view of a castle on a crag, an abbey, and many islands. Her part of Scotland is known as “Yr Hen Ogledd” – “The Old North” – because it was formerly part of one Cumbric kingdom with Wales. She descends from travellers, circus performers, mill workers and gallowglass warriors.
As a teenager she wrote fanzines, fiction for an early internet magazine, and radio plays for the BBC. She studied literature, first at Bangor, and then at Oxford, and went on to a fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge, where she published a book and many articles about the art of the novel. She lost faith with current modes of academic study of culture (works of the imagination should school us, not the other way round), and is now a tutor, ghost writer, and micro-importer of highland virgin olive oil. She forages her dinner, climbs mountains, and swims in icy caves and bottomless lochs.