THESE days he is perhaps best known as the Orkney Four’s lead petitioner in the case against lying LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael, but there is another side to Tim Morrison – he is also an author.
His first novel QueerBashing, published today by ThunderPoint is described as raw, dark and compelling.
It introduces readers to McGillivray, a failed Church of Scotland minister who takes them on a journey from the revivalist churches of Orkney in the 1970s to London’s gay bars in the 1990s to the working class Midlands, via the divinity school at Aberdeen as he fights a tug-of-war battle with himself.
Morrison told The National the novel was based on personal experience: “About 20-odd years ago I was queer-bashed – very nastily – in Middlesbrough, and it came about from that experience.
“Fairly recently I completed a Master of Literature in Orkney and Shetland Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) campus in Orkney, and turned the experience into a novel.”
Indeed Morrison – who lives in Stromness – did complete his MLitt and was named UHI Postgraduate Student of the Year 2014, an achievement that came after a long period of illness which left him in a coma for a month.
“A large part of it was written 20 years ago, but I had to rewrite it all, so it is more than a few years’ work,” he said. “Many novels out there tackle the enigmatic subject of inner confusion and torment, but I wanted to push readers out of their comfort zones with a novel about a man who is unable to accept his own very basic psychological makeup.
“I would sincerely hope that most people would find something there to be offended by. It’s a dark narrative yet there is humour in McGillivray’s story … It’s about our island communities and how they handle sexuality, and what that did to people who had to leave, about loss of faith and so on.
“No right-thinking person would want to read it – luckily there aren’t too many of them out there.”
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