Seven Books by George Mackay Brown

On the 11 October 2021, we welcomed Award-winning author and singer-songwriter Malachy Tallack to join us on Zoom for the fifth of the Seven Books series. The editor of Simple Fire: Selected Short Stories by George Mackay Brown, he introduced and answered questions on his selection of GMB short stories. It is the first such volume to be published.
Seven Books 5 in the Centenary Book Group series was hosted by the GMB Fellowship and Orkney Library & Archive on Zoom. We were joined by an audience from around the world. If you have any comments, please email: gmbfellows@gmail.com.
Simple Fire was published by Birlinn on 3 June this year.

Malachy Tallack

Malachy Tallack is an award-winning author and singer-songwriter. His first book, Sixty Degrees North (2015), was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award. His second, The Un-Discovered Islands (2016), was named Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards.
His most recent work, The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018), was his debut novel, published by Canongate. It was shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.
Malachy has written on a variety of subjects, including politics, literature, landscape and agriculture, and his articles, essays and reviews have been published widely. He received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014, and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015.
Malachy was the founding editor of the online magazine The Island Review, and was editor of Shetland Life magazine for five years.
As a singer-songwriter, he has released four albums and an EP, and has performed in venues across the UK. Malachy is from Shetland, and currently lives in Dunblane.

Seven Books
If you would like to attend a session, please request a Zoom link for the one you would like to attend: gmbfellows@gmail.com
If you would like to ask a question about any of the books featured, please email: gmbfellows@gmail.com
7pm Monday 19 April 2021
Ron Ferguson: Magnus
7pm Monday 17 May 2021
Simon Hall: The Year of the Whale
7pm Monday 7 June 2021
Pamela Beasant: Letters from Hamnavoe
7pm Thursday 29 July 2021
Morag MacInnes, Fiona MacInnes and Anne Bevan: Bairns’ Stories
7pm Monday 11 October 2021
Malachy Tallack: Simple Fire: Selected Short Stories
8pm Monday 14 Octobber 2021
Linden Bicket and Kirsteen McCue: An Orkney Tapestry
7pm Monday 18 October 2021
Maggie Fergusson: For the Islands I Sing
Return to GMB Centenary 2021
Featured image: photograph of George Mackay Brown (detail) by Gunnie Moberg courtesy Orkney Library and Archive