A Month in Sweden as UNESCO Poet in Residence at Skara Library (29/03/26)
During November 2025 I was granted a residency in UNESCO City of Literature Gothenburg and took up a place at Skara Library, about two hours from Gothenburg City. I found it to be a magical and inspiring place to live and work for the month and the people very kind and welcoming.
It was a wonderful place to give time and space to my current work in progress, Book of Orfeo, a poetry collection set after Orfeo has lost Eurydice for the final time. Orfeo wanders as an Everyman in the modern world, navigating grief and jolting up against loss, as we all do, that have lost someone dear to us. These moments both pull him into the world and away from it, into memory, as he recalls for example at the turn of a pencil sharpener, under a streetlight about to turn on, contemplating the Hokusai Wave, or a cookie, as a flamingo and with a turn of the Zamboni carving perfectly smooth curves on the ice, the fatal turn he made, breaking his bargain and losing Eurydice.
The architecture of Skara is incredible, it’s a quiet town founded in 988 and filled with impressive old stone buildings. The cathedral is known to have been consecrated in 1150, although records indicate there was a place of worship there earlier and the wonderful Old Library built in 1859, which houses one half of Sweden’s oldest book, The Skara Missal, an illuminated manuscript from the twelfth century. There is a 3 D model map of medieval Skara in one corner of the Cathedral square and it is a beautiful artefact, watching the weather change on that map as it changed around me brought me a few ideas, particularly seeing a freeze slowly creep across the map one evening as the streets froze and glittered under my excellent and grippy snow boots.
I spent the majority of my time in the Old Library, a place filled floor to ceiling with old books and lots of hideaway nooks with comfortable sofas and chairs, it was very quiet and allowed me time for the thinking around my project that I needed. It’s usually true that the thinking is long, the writing is short and the editing, again, is long (and the publishing of anything takes forever!) The new library was a good place to be, filled with different ages of children as the day progressed, groups of five year olds with their teachers in very early and then the middle school children and teens and university students much later in the day. It’s also where the Fika room was located! Coffee breaks at 9.30 am and 2.30 pm, it’s an important time to connect with everybody and the one time you will know where to meet up.
It was inspiring to be embedded within a different culture and language for the space of a month and I did quite a bit of travelling there too. First off the journey was a bit of an adventure as I decided to fly to Copenhagen and get the train over the Oresund Bridge from Denmark into Sweden. Then it was more trains with changes at Malmo and Gothenburg to head five hours north and eventually a bus to Skara. Everything in Sweden is done on apps, booking transport, booking in a time to do laundry, member’s discounts in the supermarkets, just about anything you can think of is on the apps. Before I left Scotland I didn’t even use my phone for payment in shops but I had to get used to that very quickly.
There was an opportunity to attend a gathering of the fifteen writers in Gothenburg City and I took the opportunity to do some sightseeing too. I found some excellent kanelbulle, the harbour and some impressive statues, plus The English Bookshop, they were kind enough to phone for a taxi for me when I was too lost and footsore to continue walking and I didn’t get to grips with the tram system. At the gathering there were fifteen of us and we would have liked to have attended some of each other’s public events but being scattered throughout Gothenburg, which is enormous, some of these events would have meant six hour round trips. I did attend one in Lidkoping, about a half hour away by bus that was by a Hungarian writer Monika Rusvai, who writes twists on traditional Hungarian folk tales, one of which involved a forest trapped in the eye of a young girl... The buses in Sweden are more like coaches and they don’t stop very often or seem to get stuck in traffic, I found them efficient and cosy, especially when travelling through the dark, which descends fast and early.
I think they were a little bemused to find themselves landed with a working poet, I had several pieces published and accepted whilst I was there, Breakfast TV for Dust Poetry’s Dear World issue, Phaeton for Full House Literary, The Shrieks in Gutter, and a couple of pieces for the Cat Poetry Anthology with Rough Diamond. It was great to have work coming out whilst I was there and useful in that it helped them understand my world a little more. Tobias, the head of library, would tell me I have sent the digital links around the whole library, everyone will be reading your work! So lovely to have that support!
I was asked to host a couple of public events, a reading of my long form narrative poem Medusa Retold, specially requested by my hosts as it tied in with Orange Week, a themed week in the town highlighting organisations helping women that have suffered violence. Town landmarks such as the old water tower were lit up in orange for the week as soon as it got dark, which was around 3 pm. The other event I did was host a creative writing workshop with the Art School, they were aged between 16 and 18 and very excited to be in the library and working with a published poet, (I had three new pieces published during November and I had been on local Skara media, radio and in the paper, which they were aware of) and they were very engaged with our work, plus their English was excellent – far better than my Swedish! Teens in Sweden now mostly read only in English thanks largely to BookTok and they are exposed to so much American TV and films that they pick up English easily but to take a creative writing class in another language and do well is very impressive.
I managed to come away from my residency with ten new pieces of work, including one I performed at my public event. This is a new step for me in a new form, the piece was called A Ghazal for Skara, and I thought twice about sharing such new and early work but I thought if not here and now, in the Skara library looking out at the old stones of the Skara Cathedral, when and where would possibly be better? A Ghazal is a difficult Persian art form with a lot of rules but the audience went with it. It was interesting to see how I leaned towards more formal work during my time in Sweden and to note that I’ve never written a successful Ghazal before this one. The library staff will get it printed up and put in the window so that anyone going in to the building will see it, a lovely legacy to leave, and a record of my time being poet in residence at Skara.
recent publications
In the Neighbourhood, Snowball, Rough Diamond, Spring Anthology 2026 (print only)
Eurydice, Stand, Leeds University, Winter 2026 (print only)
The Shrieks, Gutter, Feb 2026 (print only)
Rheumatology: Left Hand Press Examination, Rough Diamond Competition Anthology,...
Poet Seabird Island
Available for purchase March 30th 2024
Publisher: Boats Against the Current.
I was first published by Boats Against the Current in Jan 2022 with two poems The Grief Stone and Towards the Drowned World and for the second time in November 2022 with Telesthesia...
Chapbooks
Precious Mettle
Spotlight at The Alien Buddha Press
Reviews & blurbs
The title of Sarah Wallis’ poetry collection, Precious Mettle, is reflected by the gold-like speaker of each poem who, when compressed under extreme pressure, simply grows stronger...
Medusa Retold was published on Dec 1st!
A feminist retelling of the Medusa myth, set in a run-down, modern seaside town, Medusa Retold is filled with the magic and fury of the original tale. In this telling, loner Nuala is difficult and introverted, fascinated by creatures of the sea. Athena bec...
poetry
Art is by Immy Smith, who translated a couple of lines of text from my poem Poet & Fox (published in the Ways to Peace anthology, which marked the 2019 United Nations Day of Peace celebrations) into Morse code. She then transcribed the dots and dashes into a fox face shape as shown in her...