Latest news with #NanShepherd
Scotsman
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Nan Shepherd – Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★ Meme Girls, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★ Since she first appeared on a Scottish £5 banknote in 2016, interest in the 20th-century Scottish writer Nan Shepherd has soared. Her restoration to national fame, almost 90 years after the success of her first novel The Quarry Wood, turned out to be timely, as readers began to rediscover both her passionate connection with a natural world now increasingly under threat, and the story of her life as a young woman in a male-dominated literary world. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Susan Coyle and Adam Buksh in Nan Shepherd Naked and Unashamed – Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan It was therefore a fine moment, last year, for Firebrand Theatre and Pitlochry Festival Theatre to launch their studio show Nan Shepherd – Naked And Unashamed. Co-written by Firebrand founders Ellie Zeegen and Richard Baron, the play features just two actors, and offers an 80-minute journey through Nan Shepherd's life in flashback form. When it appeared at Pitlochry in 2024, it attracted such a strong positive response that it has now been revived, with a new cast, for another short studio run. Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at So this year, actors Susan Coyle and Adam Buksh lead us through Nan's story, settling briefly in 1981, the year of her death, before leading us through some key turning points in her life, including her early success as part of a radical literary generation that also included Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In a sense, the sheer popularity and emotional power of Baron and Zeegen's play is difficult to analyse; the play sometimes seems almost more like a lecture than a piece of drama, as – in fairly traditional style – it packs in a tremendous amount of information about this remarkable woman, and the age of war and cultural radicalism through which she lived. Yet there's something about the play's insistent loving care for a neglected part of Scotland's cultural history, and about the open, shining character of Nan herself, that makes this tale of her struggles and successes both deeply absorbing and profoundly touching, not least in its tender use of a now old-fashioned form of middle-class Scots. And in this new staging, both Coyle as Nan, and Buksh as all the men who cross her path, deliver the story with impressive skill and passion; with Coyle's Nan truly touching the heart, as a woman of sparkling wit and joy whose sense of humour endured to the last, and who now – in a final irony – finds herself immortalised on our banknotes in a 'Nordic princess' pose she adopted for a laugh, using a discarded strip of film, during what she intended as a much more serious photo-shoot. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Meme Girls Andy McGregor's latest Play, Pie And Pint mini-musical also involves a generation of young Scottish women struggling for creative expression; but in Meme Girls, the time is now, and the play features two teenage heroines growing up in the Clyde coast town of Largs. Jade is a doctor's daughter with a real gift for songwriting, while bestie Clare has had a much tougher life; and together, they begin to navigate the world of online media, performing Jade's songs, and trying to build up a following on YouTube. Their work fails to go viral, though; and after a wild night at a party leads to Clare achieving an instant online fame that has nothing to do with music, their creative and personal relationship begins to fall apart.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed review – the poetry, prose and passion of a Scottish modernist
The title comes from a short story about two hikers on a camping trip. They decide to cast off their clothes and walk through the countryside as nature intended, only to be mistaken for poachers. The story's combination of humour, transgression and ear for the Doric dialect of north-east Scotland were characteristic qualities of its author, Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), a writer unashamed by her nakedness and celebrated for her evocations of Scotland's rural environment. Celebrated, that is, once The Living Mountain, her short book about walking in the Cairngorms, was published. That was in 1977, three decades after its completion, but more especially in 2011 when it was republished by Canongate, just as it was slipping back into obscurity. It had not always been that way. As the author of three interwar novels, Shepherd was considered a significant modernist writer in her day. But, having turned her attention to teaching, not to mention roaming the hills, she had been largely forgotten at the time of her death in 1981. As this one-act play by Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen would have it, she is a woman with little concern for posterity. Played by Susan Coyle, Shepherd is resistant to flattery and modest about her achievements, coming most alive at the sound of poetry; sometimes her own, just as often not. At times in Baron's production, she asks members of the audience to read her favourite passages aloud (which, at my performance, they do impressively). Part of a generation that included the novelist Neil M Gunn and the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Shepherd enthuses about contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, to whom she was compared. This literary passion, along with an unconventional private life, is at the heart of a play that swirls around her story, taking us from wide-eyed child, discovering the beauty of pine cones, to care-home resident, refusing to be patronised by the staff. Coyle switches from excitable youth to stiff-limbed old woman and all points in between, while Adam Buksh gamely plays lovers, academics and carers. If the play skims the surface of Shepherd's appeal as a writer, it is nonetheless a warm-hearted evocation of a life led with self-determination in and out of the shadows. At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 14 June
Times
22-05-2025
- General
- Times
Nan Shepherd is on £5 note — buy her home for 100,000 of them
For more than eight decades one of Scotland's greatest mystic poets and novelists of the 20th century lived in an elegant Victorian granite five-bedroom semi on the outskirts of Aberdeen. Nan Shepherd spent her life in Dunvegan, in Cults, with its lush gardens and great bay windows opening up spectacular views of Lower Deeside. Now the property where she moved shortly after she was born and only left shortly before her death at 88 in 1981 is up for sale, at offers over £490,000. The writer, whose work has enjoyed a 21st-century resurgence in popularity and respect, inherited the home from her wealthy parents. Coming of age during the First World War — when men were in short supply — Shepherd never married. But, eschewing
Scotsman
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
New York director 'obsessed' with 'visionary' Scottish writer Nan Shepherd to make film about her life
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... She was a 'visionary' writer dubbed the Scottish Virginia Woolf, who became the first woman to appear on a five pound note. Now a New York-based film director who became 'obsessed' with the work of Nan Shepherd while studying in Edinburgh is to make a film about her life. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Antony Crook, working with Glasgow production company Tiger Lily, is in the pre-production stage of a film based on both Ms Shepherd's life and her best-known novel The Living Mountain. Scottish band Mogwai is to write and perform the score for the film - and plans to perform live at some screenings when it is released. Collaborations with other Scottish musicians are also underway. Mr Crook last year attended a performance of a play about Ms Shepherd's life, written and directed by Richard Baron, Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed, which is due to play its second run at Pitlochry Festival Theatre later this year. Watching the performance has helped inspire Mr Crook to push ahead with the film. Nan Shepherd was the first woman to be featured on a five pound note. Born in 1893, Ms Shepherd, who was an author, teacher and keen hillwalker, put aside her ground-breaking masterpiece, The Living Mountain, in the 1940s, after it was rejected by one publisher. It lay forgotten in a drawer for decades. But in 1978, it was finally published, translated into multiple languages and hailed recently as 'one of the finest books ever written on landscape and nature in Britain'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ms Shepherd later worked as a school teacher and taught teaching at the University of Aberdeen. She was known for her unconventional methods in the classroom, earning her comparisons to Miss Jean Brodie in Muriel Spark's novel. The life and legacy of writer Nan Shepherd has inspired a new film. Mr Crook, who last year made a critically acclaimed film about Glasgow band Mogwai, plans to film in Scotland, in the area of Aberdeenshire where Ms Shepherd lived. He said: 'I've loved the book for years. I've been obsessed with it and managed to persuade the family and estate of Nan Shepherd to allow me to have the film rights. Antony Crook is to direct the film. | Antony Crook 'We're in early pre-production on the film and in the process of building a team. We're still doing research at this point. The music is going to be really interesting and we're in talks about casting.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He added: 'To think that Nan Shepherd's book was a small run initially and that it has become the cult classic it is today is amazing. Last year, I went up to the Cairngorms and retraced her steps. She was very progressive and very avant-garde. She wrote in secret, she was a bit of a legend, which makes it even more magical.' An audiobook version of The Living Mountain is read by actress Tilda Swinton. Mr Baron, who came up with the idea of writing his play about Ms Shepherd during lockdown, said he was 'delighted' that a film was to be made. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The director came to see the play last year and they're now making a film about her,' he said. 'There is huge interest in her. The run [of the play] was completely sold out last year, which just shows that she really does capture the public imagination. It's extraordinary how her fame has spread well after her death in 1981. She was quite a visionary writer.'
Press and Journal
21-04-2025
- Press and Journal
Braemar cottage beloved by author Nan Shepherd needs rescued amid 'risk of collapse'
A crumbing cottage beloved as the 'holiday howff' of famed author Nan Shepherd is at risk of ruin unless the new owners are given permission for a package of rescue works. Braeview Cottage, barely more than a cabin, is sagging at the roof with its walls slowly giving way to time. The building's literary links have now energised efforts to save it. Nan Shepherd is the author of the legendary memoir The Living Mountain, which details her experiences hillwalking in the Cairngorms. She first visited this wee Deeside cottage in 1928. And once wrote about her first impressions of it… She said: 'On the April day when I first saw the 'doon-by' house, its diminutive size, its compactness… stole my heart. 'For a very long time we went back at least once, often twice a year.' Nearly a century later, the cottage is in a state of disrepair. Documents submitted to the council state: 'As the building approaches its centenary it is structurally unsound and at significant risk of being beyond effective repair.' However, a 'carefully executed programme of works' could bring it back from the brink of collapse'. Braeview Cottage has recently been bought by Calum and Jackie Innes of Blairgowrie. The couple previously restored nearby Downie's Cottage, a five-star retreat on the same plot of land in Royal Deeside. They now hope to pull off the same type of overhaul here, with various plans to spruce it up. The roof is to be dismantled and rebuilt using corrugated steel sheeting in its original colour. Decayed external walls are to be rebuilt and the cottage's original layout, including its steep stair and signature gable window, will be saved with input from conservation specialists. The owners also hope Braeview will be listed by Historic Environment Scotland, which would mean its 'special interest' is recorded. It is unclear what the future plans for the building are beyond salvaging it, but those behind the revamp hint at its growing appeal. Documents sent to the council by Galbraith add: 'Braeview is now a somewhat dilapidated and unassuming property. 'But in recent years its association with Nan Shepherd has resulted in it attracting interest both locally and internationally.' You can see the plans on the Aberdeenshire Council website. Who was Nan Shepherd, the Aberdeenshire writer on our banknotes? Rickety farmhouse waylays tycoon's Abergeldie Estate plans and new Donmouth dream home – with roof terrace We go behind the scenes at the luxury Fife Arms Hotel in Braemar
