Student and alumni success stories

We're pleased to applaud successes by several of our students and recent alumni - in fact, we're having trouble keeping up with them on this blog.

Second-year part-timer Frances Hider has been rubbing shoulders in print with Liz Lochhead, Alisdair Gray, Alexander McCall Smith and our first writer-in-residence, James Robertson. All of them have contributed to My Favourite Place, a project by BBC Radio Scotland and the Scottish Book Trust celebrating beloved locations in Scotland.

Frances Hider reads at the West Port Book Festival, photo © chrisdonia

Frances had her piece about Edinburgh's Waverley Railway Station selected from hundreds of entries for inclusion in the book. She gave a reading of it during the West Port Book Festival and even found herself giving an impromptu Q&A about the project. Frances developed the piece through her mentoring sessions on the MA course - you can read it for yourself here.

Recent alumni Barbara Melville is the new writer-in-residence at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, a world leading research centre in Edinburgh that studies stem cells, disease and tissue repair to advance human health and acts as a centre for public engagement.

"I'll be there three days a week," Barbara says, "writing, researching and reflecting on my own work. I'l l also be participating in creative outreach projects to help communicate science to the general public."

Recent graduate Laura Denham made her print fiction debut in Scottish magazine Octavius with a short story written in our Genre Fiction module. Reviewer Calathumpian says Laura's story Mockingbird "gets under the very skin of its reader, creating a dreamscape of damp unease that perturbed me for hours after", while Scots Whay Hae! describes it as "rich as anything I've read this year".