The Centre for Poetic Innovation addresses poetry and poetics creatively, critically and historically, promoting and studying poetic innovation in a broad sense of both terms, from poetry as traditionally understood to poetic aspects of visual and material art forms, of prose writing as well as interactions with music, dance and digital poetry. The key aims of the Centre are:
- Hosting speakers, workshops and conferences
- Support and development of doctoral and post-doctoral research
- Public engagement and impact activities
- Joint Research Grant applications and research projects
Upcoming event
ALASTAIR REID (1926-2014): The Legacy
Thursday 19 November 2026, 5-8pm, UCO School III
a collaboration with the Spanish department
Alastair Reid (1926-2014) was one of the major Scottish poets – and translators of poetry – in the twentieth century. He studied Spanish at the University of St Andrews and spent much of his adult life in Spanish-speaking countries and in the United States, repatriating himself to Scotland for short periods – the ‘return of the native’. He was a son of the manse: his father was a Church of Scotland minister in Whithorn in the south-west of the country. Though he never lost his affection for his Scottish family nor his fascination with Scotland, he felt that the country suffered from a culture of Calvinistic gloom and uptight negativity and he sought more liberating milieux. (He quoted a psychiatrist friend who suggested that ‘if Freud had known anything about Scotland, he would have left Vienna like an arrow and taken on the whole population as a collective patient’.)
In due course he became one of the leading translators, into English, of Latin American poets, notably Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, both of whom he befriended. His career bears a striking resemblance to that of an almost exact contemporary, the Glasgow-born Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson (1927-2012), from a repressive Catholic background; he, too, became a prolific translator from Spanish, and not least its variants from Castilian – Catalan, Galician, and so on. Scholarly comparison of the work of the two poets would yield much.
Alastair Reid’s poetry is collected mainly in Weathering (1978), and his prose in Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner (1987). His laid-back, gently comic tone is evident in such popular poems as ‘Scotland’ (set cheekily in St Andrews) and ‘The O-Filler’, a quirky study in obsession; a more serious note is sounded in the reflectively nomadic ‘The Spiral’. There are several poems on cats, with whom he had a natural affinity. Along with another expat Scottish poet who occasionally came back, he is an archetype of Scotus vagans, the ‘wandering Scot’.
In 2011 his alma mater awarded its prodigal son an honorary doctorate.
The event will include:
- a discussion of Alastair Reid’s translation of Borges’s poetry by Honours students in Spanish
- a conversation around Alastair Reid’s legacy as a poet, scholar and translator
- a reading of Alastair Reid’s poetry (Jordi Larios and Elodie Laügt)
- the projection of a film and display of sculptures by Kenny Munro
Guest speakers will include:
Gillian Pagan, Alastair Reid’s niece;
Jasper Reid, his son, who will be joining us by video link from Boston;
Bill Pagan, Gillian’s husband, a Trustee of a charity supporting Arabic and Iranian studies at the University of St Andrews, and Alastair’s Scottish lawyer;
Kenny Munro, sculptor, environmental artist, graphic designer, who worked with Alastair Reid on a Stanza-commissioned project involving words and images, at St Andrews in 2007 and who will recreate this for us;
Dr Ted Bergman, Senior Lecturer in Spanish, University of St Andrews, who will discuss Alastair Reid’s translation of a poem by Borges;
Dr Tom Hubbard, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, University of St Andrews and Associate of the Centre for Poetic Innovation, who as Librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library located a recording of Neruda’s voice for Alastair Reid’s use during a lecture which was an Edinburgh International Festival event at St Cecilia’s Hall in 1990.
For enquiries, please email Dr Elodie Laügt ([email protected])