Herald Magazine

We are delighted to announce the opening of this year’s McCash Scots Language Poetry Prize. Run jointly by The Herald and Glasgow University, this is a co-operative initiative that has been running successfully since the early 2000s and is the premiere Scots poetry prize. This year, the generous awards from the University’s McCash bequest will be three prizes of £200 and seven of £150, distributed according to the merit of the poems in the judges’ view. This year, instead of suggesting a specific theme, we have decided to provide a selection of seven quotations which we think might prompt a poem or two in response. Just select one or two or even three from the following lines by Robert Burns and take them as inspirations for an original poem of your own, in the Scots language.

Dame Mary says eccentric Elagabalus's reputation – who recently hit the headlines for being reclassified as an LGBT figure by a Hertfordshire museum because he was the focus of an unverified Roman tale that he asked doctors to make him a woman – "reminds us that some of our debates about gender and gender division are not new".