tmurraytg

Hello there, and welcome to my website.  Hope you enjoy.

I am a full-time writer, mentor and editor based in Dumfries

I am currently one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poetry Ambassadors.

I am currently a mentors on the ‘Next Generation Young Makers’ project, working in partnership with the Scottish Poetry Library.

Also Open Book Lead Reader in the Scottish Borders and Dumfries.

A widely published poet in Scotland, the UK and further afield; also widely published as a fiction writer; my plays have been performed and read at various venues in the UK including the Traverse in Edinburgh and the Arches in Glasgow.  My play ‘Sins of the Father’ was a winner of the Rowan Tree Playwrighting Competition and afterwards toured.

I have facilitated over two hundred and fifty creative writing workshops and mentored over sixty individual writers.

My previous residencies include: Scottish Book Trust Reader in Residence to Scottish Borders Libraries; Creative Writing Fellow to Tyne and Esk Writers working with writers’ groups across East Lothian and Midlothian; Clackmannanshire Writer in Residence.

I was an editor of the Scottish Borders based literary magazine, The Eildon Tree for 11 years.

My stories and poems published in magazines and anthologies in Scotland, and further afield. My publications include:  The Future is Behind You (poetry), Sins of the Father (play), The Clash (play) and Out of My Head (fiction).

I am widely experienced in running workshops and reading and discussing my own work.   If you would like me to come and work with your group or organisation you can do so through the Scottish Book Trust Live Literature scheme or you can contact me at tmurraytg@aol.com to discuss.

Visit my blog for updates on my writing life.  PostcardsfromBorderland

One of my poems.

MY FATHER.  (After a painting by John Bellany.)

If I could draw or paint

To save my life I would have

Sat him in his favourite white leathered chair.

I would have his freckled, still hands

Drumming decreasing time on the dark wooden arm.

I would have him stare into his past, his face

Sagging with time, his hands though strong

And capable still of lifting me high to catch

The stars.

If I could draw or paint

To save myself I would do all this

And wonder

How can it be that I have my father’s hands,

When all I do is fetch words from one place

To the next.

He lifted weights far greater than a laughing

Boy.

His hands were marked deep into sinew that worked

Finger to the bone.

Like Bellany I would make those hands

Huge, and wonder if he too inherited his fathers hands,

And after all, he too when asked for a subtitle

Answered. ‘Self portrait.