Kenneth White (1936–2023) established his reputation as a poet, essayist and travel writer in France in the 1970s and 80s, having left Britain in 1970. He became Professor of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne in 1983 and founded the International Institute of Geopoetics in Paris in 1989. The three books in this volume are what he came to describe as ‘waybooks’, accounts of travels designed to confront the reader with the condition of the modern world and, through their invocation of the notion of geopoetics, to reveal what might lie beyond its familiar limit.
Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He published numerous works of poetry and prose, with volumes and essays in French as well as English. His work has also been translated into several languages.
He was the recipient of many awards and honours, in Europe and Scotland, including the Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français by the Académie française for his work as a whole (1985), the Édouard Glissant prize from the University of Paris VIII for his ‘openness to the cultures of the world’ (2004) and Prix de poésie Alain Bosquet for Les Archives du Littoral, a bilingual poetry collection (2011). White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University and was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy.
In 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to promote further research into the cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade. It has since produced six Cahiers de Géopoétique (journals) in French, publishing a range of work on geopoetics from throughout the world. Geopoetics Centres have since been set up in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, Quebec, New Caledonia and France.
His publications in English include, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (2013), The Wanderer and his Charts (2004), Open World: The Collected Poems 1960-2000 (2003) and House of Tides (2000). He lived on the north coast of Brittany.
Cairns Craig is Professor Emeritus in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. His most recent books are
The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture, Independence (2018) and
Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death (2019), both published by Edinburgh University Press. He was the general editor of the four volume
History of Scottish Literature published by Aberdeen University Press in 1987, and was involved in editing the magazines
Cencrastus and
Radical Scotland in the 1980s. Other books on Scottish subjects include
The Modern Scottish Novel (1999) and
Intending Scotland (2009).
