The Great Edge

THE GREAT EDGE brings together lives – ancient and modern – on the northern plateau where Scotland stops and starts, where history and myth fuel everyday reality, and where nothing is as it seems.

When an archaeologist comes to Caithness to research an early Christian chapel, she must reckon with a crisis that is global and contemporary as well as local and ancient. Adopted by Fracher, a retired roughneck and local fisherman, Mags is spun into a galaxy of characters and events that force her to a profound understanding of the relationship between Past, Present and Future. Meanwhile, in 21st-century Atomic City, the decommissioning of a national nuclear icon brings several dreams to an end.

THE GREAT EDGE is a story of science, engineering and geology; of Picts and Irish monks, Norse mythology, and Celtic civilisation. Through the eyes of a Norse skald, we begin to see there is little in the 21st century that hasn’t been experienced before. As we witness global warming and Arctic ice-melt, are we all waiting for the wave? In THE GREAT EDGE the wave duly arrives.

George Gunn is a writer whose work is rooted in, though never limited by, his native Caithness in the Scottish Highlands. Born in 1956, he cannot remember a time when he did not write. Working offshore as a young man he lived in Edinburgh, serving his writing apprenticeship with encouragement from Scottish mentors like Hamish Henderson, Angus Calder, and David Morrison in Wick. Since then, he has produced nine published collections of poetry, and over 50 plays produced for stage or radio.

An active member of the Edinburgh Playwrights' Workshop throughout the 1980's, his vision of his art might be described as "by the people: for the people". This commitment was at the heart of The Grey Coast Theatre Company, which he founded in 1992. By its closure in 2010 the company had mounted 35 productions, produced in the spirit of Hamish Henderson's 'carrying stream' of folk culture, and including new plays by Highland writers as well as music commissions and education projects for big, site-specific community plays. A campaigner for a National Theatre of Scotland, he believes professional cultural activity must be grounded in the people and the places that generate its energy and ideas. Far from compromising quality or becoming parochial, this rootedness guarantees its integrity.

Mindful of his public responsibility as a writer in the bardic or skald traditions, he does not limit himself to 'creative' writing. He writes a regular topical column "From the Province of the Cat" for the online magazine Bella Caledonia. A prose book about Caithness, "The Province of the Cat" was published by The Islands Book Trust in 2015. Also in 2015 he collaborated with the Caithness fiddler/composer Gordon Gunn on the CD "A Musical Map of Caithness".

He has broadcast series on BBC Radio Scotland and Radio 4, and his work has been translated into Icelandic, French and Gaelic. He has been Writer in Residence for The Aberdeen Alternative Festival, Banff and Buchan District Council, Orkney Islands Council, The Strathnaver Museum, The Scottish Poetry Library, and The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool. Until recently writing tutor for North Highland College UHI, he currently runs the Ravenskald Writers' Workshop in Thurso, where he lives with his wife Christine.

In 2016 "The Great Edge" (then unpublished) was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.