Karine Polwart is a well-respected Scottish writer, musician and storyteller whose work, that evokes a richness of place, hidden histories, scientific enquiry and folklore, spanning collaborations, solo performances, poetic essays, picture books, theatre projects and radio documentaries. She has been chosen by Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery to be the recipient of this year’s Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship that offers the opportunity for a mid-career writer to spend a year dedicated to producing their own new writing, gaining support and inspiration from a host organisation.
This year’s chosen theme by Fruitmarket is ‘Attached to Land’ that takes inspiration from Fruitmarket’s 2025–2026 programme. Working through the year, Polwart will engage with the programmes looking to a suite of lyrics from her existing original music repertoire that are deeply connected to the rural, coastal and industrial landscapes of the Forth Valley and Borders.
Fruitmarket’s Partnerships Curator Iain Morrison said “Fruitmarket is delighted to award the Gavin Wallace Fellowship to Karine Polwart. Karine has an enviable profile as a musician yet her considerable writing practice deserves to be better known. A degree in philosophy pre-dates her musical career, and her appetite for forging connections between different subjects is borne out in her growing body of environmentally focused, non-fiction work for adults. Her spirit of enquiry makes her an ideal partner for Fruitmarket which aims to allow audiences to follow ideas wherever they lead across artforms. Fruitmarket’s theme for the Fellowship is ‘Attached to Land: Mutual Accountability Within Environmental Permacrisis.’ We look forward to sharing Karine’s journey over the course of the coming months as she produces work drawn from her investigation of the human geographies of the Forth estuary and further afield, in dialogue with themes of deep geology and land stewardship in Fruitmarket’s wider programmes.
Working with Scottish and British writers as part of a growing strand of literature events and writing commissions, Fruitmarket is increasingly known as a resource and home for writers and their practices. They have built a reputation for and expertise in helping writers at mid-career, supporting them to develop and present new work in the context of an established and developing practice, and in supporting the publication of new writing in their in-house publications that offer writers a very hands-on experience of the design process.
Karine Polwart said “I’m excited and deeply grateful to accept the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship in association with the Fruitmarket and Creative Scotland. As a writer of creative non-fiction – in prose, performance and broadcast – as well as song, spoken word and picture book, almost all my work is place-based, and digs into the many uneasy ways we co-exist with greater-than-human life. My proposed project is rooted in the Forth Valley and Borders coastline, which I call home. It’s a landscape of personal significance to me and also a social, economic and political microcosm of contested edge land, shaped by historic and contemporary industries and forces of local and global power. Along the John Muir Way from Grangemouth to the Tarmac Cement Works and Torness Power Station beyond Dunbar, I’m fascinated by the ideas and practices of extraction and devotion, memorialisation and care, environmental stewardship and deep geological time embedded in this landscape. I can’t wait to get started.”
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 