About…

Donald S. Murray was raised in Ness in the Isle of Lewis. He spent his teenage years at The Nicolson Institute in Stornoway, before studying at the University of Glasgow in the 1980s. After receiving an MA (Joint Hons) in English and Scottish Literature, he went on to gain a Diploma in Education and a Secondary Teaching Qualification.

Since then, Donald has written a wide variety of books and published countless essays, columns, short stories, and poems in the likes of The Herald, The Guardian, and The Island Review. His writing, both of fiction and non-fiction, has received widespread critical acclaim and appeared on shortlists and longlists for numerous literary awards.

His debut novel, As the Women Lay Dreaming, won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the The Herald Scottish Culture Awards Outstanding Literature Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award in 2019.

In 2015, Sequamur, Donald’s first full-length Gaelic play, was performed throughout Scotland, including at the Edinburgh Festival, as well as in Belfast, London, and Ypres in Belgium. Described as 'moving, powerful, with a message that resonates today,' it examined the effect of the First World War on the The Nicolson Institute in Stornoway.

As a native Gaelic speaker, Donald’s voice can often be heard on BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, while on BBC Radio Four he has featured on Open Book with Mariella Frostrup. He has appeared on TV, on BBC Four’s Birds Britannia, a series looking at the different birds that live in the UK, and on The Last Seabird Summer, which examined the decline of seabirds in the North Atlantic.

Donald also regularly speaks at book festivals and conferences around the world, and has delivered talks at the University of Reykjavik in Iceland; the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland; the Nordic Centre in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands; the Blasket Centre in Dingle, Ireland; and the Pisa International Book Festival in Italy, among others. In 2020, he was elected as a committee member of the Society of Authors in Scotland, which protects the rights and interest of authors.

After 30 years as an English teacher, Donald became a full-time writer in 2012. He now lives and works in Shetland.

(Updated July 27, 2021)

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Inspiration

Donald S. Murray shares his sources of inspiration, from early books and supportive school teachers, to music, film, and poetry.

On writing:

'In terms of writing, my first inspiration was Bimbo. A name which now has rather unfortunate connotations, it was once the title of a comic for pupils in their first year or so of primary school and served as a model for my earliest pieces of writing. I recall once sitting re-creating on the floor of our sitting room and asking my Dad to take it to the local shop and sell it for me. He came home the following evening with an old threepenny glinting in his fingers, telling me he had received this for my scrawls and scribbles.'

I was also lucky in a number of my teachers, especially the late Charles Macdonald or Tearlach Louis, the headmaster of Cross Primary School in Ness who provided me with a plethora of thick red notebooks for my ramblings. (They were invariably based on spy stories I had read.) Later there was Tom Clark who was my English teacher in the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. He particularly noticed my fondness for drama, encouraging me to write plays for the local SCDA (or Scottish Community Drama Association) Festival. It was probably through this that I met Norman Macdonald, who wrote ‘Calum Tod’ and ‘The Shutter Falls’ – the latter quite remarkably a BBC Play for today in the early seventies.

Among his work, too, was the first Gaelic account I ever read of the Iolaire disaster – ‘Call An t-Iolaire’. He showed this to me in its draft stages. Sometimes life goes round in circles.