The Many Voices podcast by Scottish PEN brings into focus voices that are often marginalised or silenced. In each podcast, we’ll hear discussions between writers involved in our Many Voices outreach project, readings, and a featured interview with a Scottish PEN member about the year-round work we do.
In this episode writers Karen Campbell and Kerrie O’Brien discuss working with a writing group who have experienced addiction and homelessness supported by the charity Move On, the landscape of rough sleeping in Glasgow and Dublin, and how writing can help remove the stigma around issues such as homelessness and addiction. Some of the writers from the Move On group read work produced during the project. Following this, Nik Williams, the Project Manager at Scottish PEN talks about the impact of surveillance on the willingness of Scottish writers to write and research challenging issues and introduces Scottish PEN’s research on self-censorship in the age of big data.
Scottish writer Karen Campbell is the author of six novels, most recently Rise and This is Where I Am, both published by Bloomsbury Circus. A graduate of Glasgow University's Creative Writing Masters, Karen also teaches creative writing.
Kerrie O’Brien is a writer and poet from Dublin. Her debut collection of poetry Illuminate was published by in October 2016, and she is the Editor of Looking at The Stars, an anthology of Irish writing in support of the Rough Sleeper Team of the Dublin Simon Community.
Nik Williams is the project manager at Scottish PEN and has been published in Index on Censorship, openDemocracy, The Herald, The National and CommonSpace.
The podcast is hosted by Sasha De-Buyl and produced by Colin Fraser. Many Voices is funded by Creative Scotland.