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Listen To The Voice
by Iain Crichton Smith
ISBN: 9780862414344
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jun 2008
Format: Paperback
Price: £7.99
Stock Status: in stock
This collection of the best of Iain Crichton Smith’s short fiction brings together not one but many voices, both public and private. Ranging from inner promptings towards self-discovery, through the unconscious comedy of everyday speech, to the rantings of near madness, these stories display the peaks of Crichton Smith’s wry, surrealistic humour, and his confessional mode in re-telling the past. The longer stories, illustrative of Crichton Smith’s novels, are represented by ‘Murdo’ and the seminal ‘The Black and the Red’. There are also outstanding short pieces such as ‘Listen to the Voice’ and the poignant vignette, ‘The Dying’.
Iain Crichton Smith (1928-98) was born in Glasgow and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of Lewis before going to Aberdeen to attend university. As a sensitive and complex poet in both English and his native Gaelic, he has published over twenty-five books of verse, from The Long River in 1955 to the Collected Poems of 1922. In his 1986 collection A Life, the poet looked back over his time in Lewis and Aberdeen, recalling a spell of National Service in the fifties, and then his years as an English teacher, working first in Clydebank and Dumbarton and then at the High School in Oban, where he taught until his retirement in 1977. Crichton Smith was the recipient of many literary prizes, with Saltire Society and Scottish Arts Council Awards and fellowships, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and, in 1980, an OBE
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