Ken Cockburn is a poet based in Edinburgh. He studied French and German at Aberdeen University, and Theatre Studies at University College Cardiff, before working in theatre and gallery administration in Cardiff and Edinburgh. After several years at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, since 2004 he has freelanced, working in schools, colleges and community settings, undertaking writing commissions, and collaborating with visual artists.

His first collection, Souvenirs and Homelands, was shortlisted for a Saltire Award in 1998. On the Flyleaf was published in 2007, and Floating the Woods in  2018. His poems have appeared in anthologies including 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems (2008), Into the Forest: An Anthology of Tree Poems (2013), and A Year of Scottish Poems (2018).

He has read at venues and festivals across the UK and abroad, including Ars Poetica, Bratislava, Slovakia; Edinburgh International Book Festival; Poetry International, Royal Festival Hall, London; planten un blomen, Hamburg, Germany; StAnza, St Andrews Poetry Festival; The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere; and the Festival International de Poésie Trois-Rivières, Canada.

Collaborations with visual artists on book, exhibition and public art projects include Glenn Badraig with Charles March; Veined with Shadow-branches, an exploration of the Ettrick Valley with painter Andrew Mackenzie; Ness with sculptor Mary Bourne, for the redeveloped Inverness riverside; MINE with Susheila Jamieson for a Melville Housing development in Mayfield, Midlothian; and Yen to See Distant Places with ~in the fields.

Ken has worked with Alec Finlay for many years. Together they established and ran pocketbooks, an award-winning series of books of poetry and visual art. The Road North (2010-14) was a journey around Scotland guided by the 17th-century Japanese poet Basho, which led an extensive blog, an exhibition, and a jointly-composed long poem published in book form. In 2013 and 2016 they made another Scottish journey, Out of Books, visiting sites associated with Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 tour to the Hebrides. there were our own there were the others (2014), which marked the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, was realised as a series of installations and walks at National Trust properties, and a publication.

His translations of contemporary German poetry include work by Christine Marendon, Arne Rautenberg and Thomas Rosenlöcher. His translations of Rautenberg’s poems were collected in Snapdragon (2012), and Heroines from Abroad, a book of Marendon translations, appeared from Carcanet in 2018. He was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship for Literary Translation 2008, and has twice received commendations in the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. Other published translations include poems by Thomas Brasch, Heinz Czechowski, Günter Eich, Adel Karasholi and Ulf Stolterfoht, as well as fiction by Christopher Ecker and Sasa Stanasic.

Ken has wide experience of running poetry sessions and writing workshops for children and adults in a range of indoor and outdoor settings including schools, libraries, prisons, hospices and care homes, as well as gardens, beaches and woodland. He has worked with organisations including National Trust for Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, Trees for Life, Scottish Care, Historic Environment Scotland, Edinburgh College of Art and Artlink Edinburgh and Lothians, as well as many local authorities, library services and individual schools. For several years he worked as a Living Voices facilitator, running sessions in care homes in Perth & Kinross.

He has written resources for primary and secondary school teachers, including materials focussing on poems from around the world (The Written World), World War One (Ghosts of War) and the Edwin Morgan Archive. Other resources include ‘Parliament and Poetry’,  ‘Exploring Sonnets Interactively’ and materials on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert.

After running occasional poetry walks in the city’s Old Town from 2007, in 2015 he established Edinburgh Poetry Tours, and has since organised walks for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Tradfest and the Scottish Storytelling Festival, as well as for organisations including Edinburgh College of Art, Society of Authors in Scotland, Artlink and Edinburgh City of Literature Trust.

In Edinburgh he has also presented poetry in libraries, galleries, pubs and the Scottish parliament building. At the National Library of Scotland, he devised and co-presented ‘Some Bat-squeak Echo of Other Time‘, ‘a tour guided by fiction’ which used the whole library as a theatre set. His poem ‘Pandora’s Light Box’ describes the Talbot Rice Gallery, now part of the University of Edinburgh, and formerly a chemsitry lecture theatre and pioneering natural history museum.

Further afield, he has led poetry walks at Traquair House in the Scottish Borders, at Hamburg’s planten un blomen, and at National Trust properties in England and Wales, as part of a First World War memorial project with Alec Finlay.

Images above (l-r): ‘Some Bat-squeak Echo of Other Time‘; Out of Books; there were our own there were the others