The Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship 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. Every year, the Fellowship has a broad theme to guide the relationship between the writer, their work, and the host. Fruitmarket’s chosen theme is ‘Attached to Land’.
The environmental focus of the theme takes inspiration from Fruitmarket’s 2025–2026 programme including exhibitions from the late Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith and Scotland-based artist Ilana Halperin. Working through the year Polwart will engage with Fruitmarket’s programmes to fuel her writing, looking to a suite of lyrics from her existing original music repertoire which serve as poetic provocations to deeper, multi-form writing. Polwart’s curiosity and creativity are deeply connected to the rural, coastal, and industrial landscapes of the Forth Valley and Borders.
Iain Morrison, Partnerships Curator at Fruitmarket 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 writing practices. Over the last five years they have commissioned writers including Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Thomas A. Clark, and Janette Ayachi. 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.
Beth Cochrane, Literature Officer at Creative Scotland said: "Karine Polwart has long been a prominent voice in Scottish culture and her appointment as this year’s Gavin Wallace Fellow is an incredibly exciting moment. Paired with Fruitmarket, Karine will continue to build on her work as an author and enjoy a monumental year addressing the theme ‘Attached to Land’.
"It’s a pleasure to see Karine join the dynamic cohort of Gavin Wallace Fellows from across the years and we look forward to seeing what she will do with the unique support and framing the Fellowship grants. Our thanks to Fruitmarket for partnering with Karine in this next step of her writing journey."
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 of 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."
The Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship was established in 2014 in memory of Dr Gavin Wallace who dedicated his entire professional life to supporting Scottish literature. Following the sad loss of Dr Wallace in February 2013, Creative Scotland established an annual fellowship in his name to honour his memory and commemorate and continue his good work. The fund is supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Background
Header image is KP Fala by Suzanne Heffron.
Karine Polwart is a writer, musician, and storyteller whose work evokes a richness of place, hidden histories, scientific enquiry and folklore. Across multi-artist collaborations and intimate solo performances, poetic essays and picture books, theatre projects and radio documentaries, she conjures the beauty and magic, the sorrow and darkness of the world out of the corner of her eye, with lyricism and tenderness. Trees and rocks speak. Birds flit in and out of vision. And the intimate particularities of the people and landscapes she knows and loves reflect the complexities of the wider world, and our contested times.
Karine’s recent writing includes the lyrical essays: I Burn But I Am Not Consumed, introducing Alicia Bruce’s photographic collection documenting environmental activism against the Trump International Golf Course at Balmedie in Aberdeenshire; Find the Ground, published in Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland edited by Kathleen Jamie (Canongate 2020); and Wind Resistance rewritten from her live presentation with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh during 2016’s Edinburgh International Festival (Faber & Faber 2017). She has published two books for children with illustrator Kate Leiper, The Queen of the Birds and A Wee Bird was Watching, that introduce children to some of the challenges facing humanity in an environmentally interlinked world.
Karine is represented by Jenny Brown at Jenny Brown Associates.
Fruitmarket is a free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, which provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process. Creativity makes space for meaning, and we create a welcoming space for people to think with contemporary art and culture in ways that are helpful to them – for free. Further information at fruitmarket.co.uk. Follow us on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
Creative Scotland is the public body that supports culture and creativity across all parts of Scotland, distributing funding provided by the Scottish Government and The National Lottery, which, now in its 30th year, has supported over 14,600 projects with more than £501.9 million in funding through Creative Scotland and its predecessor, the Scottish Arts Council. Further information at creativescotland.com. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Learn more about the value of art and creativity in Scotland and join in at www.ourcreativevoice.scot.