AWARD-winning actor, playwright and poet Gerda Stevenson will deliver this year’s Thomas Muir Memorial Lecture.
Stevenson’s talk, at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, on August 24 at 7.30pm, will be based on her poetry collection Quines: Poems in Tribute to Women of Scotland, published on International Women’s Day this year.
She follows in the footsteps of Alex Salmond, Lesley Riddoch and Tommy Sheppard, who delivered the previous three lectures.
READ MORE: New book of poetry celebrates the women of Scotland
Quines celebrates 78 women, including St Enoch – the mother of St Mungo – the Chartist leader Helen Macfarlane, the suffragette Helen Crawfurd, and the painter Joan Eardley.
Stevenson won the 2013 Yes Festival Poetry Challenge, and was awarded the Robert Tannahill Poetry Prize last year.
She has played a vast range of parts on stage, including Desdemona and Lady MacBeth, she was Murren's mother in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, and has made regular appearances on TV in Shetland, Heartbeat, Midsomer Murders, and The Bill, among others.
Her plays include the critically acclaimed Federer v Murray, which was shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Theatre Writing Award in 2010, and was runner-up for Best Scottish Drama at the Edinburgh Fringe. It transferred to New York in 2012.
Stevenson also won the Bafta Scotland award for best actress in the 1993 film Blue Black Permanent.
The Thomas Muir Memorial Lecture is an annual event in memory of the Scottish reformer who was charged with sedition and in 1793 sentenced to 14 years transportation for campaigning for universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. He escaped from the penal colony at Sydney and died aged just 33 in Paris, after receiving horrific wounds to his face and eye in a sea battle.
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