Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, the former writer in residence at Edinburgh University, and Edinburgh’s Makar – that is, their Poet Laureate.
He is the author of Boy Friends, which was a Sunday Times Critics Choice and shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish National Book Awards.
His latest book Muckle Flugga is a whimsical tale of life on a remote island which is turned upside down by a stranger’s arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition, and leaving a young dreamer’s future hanging in the balance.
We spoke to Michael during Sydney Writers Festival and he was full of irresistible chat about the magic of travelling and festivals and the power of the connections you can make along the way.
As the Makar of Edinburgh he has become something of an ambassador for the festival city and so we, of course, wanted his top tunes that sing Edinburgh to him, as well as the best places for snacks, drinks, and some down- time if you’re over there getting to the shows.
Is this the first time you’ve been down in this part of the world for the literary festivals?
Michael Pedersen: Yes and no. It’s the first time I’ve seriously toured Australia and been part of the book festivals, but once before in 2019, I stopped in Brisbane for 48 hours to read at the Queensland Poetry Festival, but it was a sort of hazy jet lag experience straight off the plane. I crashed out, did a morning reading, then did an evening reading, went to a wildlife park, got back on a plane. So I don’t like to say that I’ve toured Australia because it was not a robust cultural scavenge of the country- it was a very particular 32 hours in Brisbane. I enjoyed it, though.
What’s your fondest memory of Brisbane, then?
I’m a big fan of wildlife parks, and I believe the one I went to was run by Steve Irwin’s daughter. I saw some koalas, some kangaroos and some platypus, all the good creatures that I came to gaze and gawk at. That is my first memory. Also, there was this like kooky, man-made beach on the side of the river. So I went swimming and paddling in that. I like to swim in open water. In Australia, you can get some biters if you get into the water- and that was biter free being entirely man-made.
Talking about the water, have you made it down to the beach in Sydney while you’ve been here?
No, not yet. I’ve only been here a couple of nights, and I did the opening gala, and then I went on a behind the scenes tour of the Opera House with all the international writers, which was incredible. I was making eyes, actually, at the Lunar Park over the water, that looked quite spooky, quite cool. I have a friend taking me out for oysters, and someone else taking me out for dinner once all my events are done, and I’ve been visiting bookshops. So it’ll be a stomach and bookshop visit.
Well, that’s what Sydney is all about- the food and the views, and having a good time. Your book, Muckle Flugga, is very Scottish and is doing so well internationally. Have you been surprised about any countries that it has been picked up in?
It’s really beautiful to see it scrolling out everywhere. It’s done really well in Germany and comes there with the title Der Letzte Leuchtturm (Editor’s note: The Last Lighthouse). As you might imagine, the title Muckle Flugga has not survived any of the international translations. It is about to come out in France. I’m actually going straight from here to Paris to do a publicity tour. The French book coming out has the title Le Phare de l’impossible (Editor’s note: The Impossible Lighthouse). And then it’s coming out in Spanish and Italian.
It’s been doing brilliantly in Australia and New Zealand, and obviously that’s halfway across the globe. I have not been here to service the book or do any shows until now, so that’s always a big test. As a writer that tours a lot and that performs a lot in theatre spaces, I know I can often get people into a room and engage them with the book in that way. That’s easy to do all over the UK and across Europe. But for the book to galvanise its own audience halfway across the globe without me being there to coax them into it has been beautiful.
You’ve been on a bit of a circuit down under. What have you loved about the Sydney Writers Festival and its connections to some of the other festivals in the region?
Sydney does it so well because they’re part of this collaborative triptych with Auckland Writers Festival and Melbourne Writers Festival, and it means they can invite international writers from all over the world.You can sort of offset your carbon footprint in that sense by actually making sure that you’re here to do a lot of shows, meet a lot of audiences, visit a lot of bookshops. I always make sure to sign up for some of the extracurriculars. I was doing high school visits out in Wellington, New Zealand. And then, as a group of international writers travelling between the three, you get this beautiful connection. You’re on the same circuit together and friendships come out the other end of it.
I’ve been travelling a bit with Roddy Doyle and David Szalay and Rebecca Kuang, and I love their books and knew none of them before this. Hopefully I have at least a friendly nature now with them and we’ve connected on a human level outside of literature as well.
I’ve loved doing the opening galas- I did Auckland and here in Sydney. It shows how much faith the festival has in you as a writer, to put you as part of those lineups. You are the amongst the first voices everyone will hear at these different events and you’re supposed to light the fuse or whet the appetite. It’s a beautiful, gracious boom. I’d say that’s one of the most exciting things about it.
What do you think the magic is of festivals, wherever they are?
You put your faith in these beautiful curators that they can bring together these formidable, robust programs on all sorts of topics, across all the genres, and it just carousels together. There’s your plan- you pick out your favourite writers and your favourite books and the topics that appeal to you. And then I think you always have to sort of throw yourself at the mercy of the event sometimes. Listen to what people are talking about in the bookshops, listen to what people are galvanising around and excited to go see. You can take a lot of pleasure in becoming a sheep, following the crowd into these big rooms. They’re going there for a reason. Some of the most popular events are not always to do with the gravitas of the author. It’s about the topic. It’s about the tension, the conflict, and the synergy that has been built into the event.
For me it’s about connections, it’s friendships, it’s writers, it’s getting insights, it’s putting my books in the hands of writers that I’ve worshipped at the altar of.
Muckle Flugga is such a magical story, and it’s set in Shetland on an island. So many novels use the vehicle of an island to make a story work. Was it a conscious decision to use an island as a location or did it just happen?
So I had the spark of these two boys, their friendship, conflicts, vulnerability, and they needed to find a home. I’d written a nonfiction book about sort of romantic male friendship called Boy Friends in a 200- year- old watch tower in Northern Ireland called the The Curfew Tower- it has a veritable dungeon in its belly – and its owned by Bill Drummond from the band The KLF – the guy who burned a million pounds in cash! Anyway, I wanted to find these fictional characters a home, and I knew it had to be in a tower.
I initially wanted it to be in one of the Stevenson lighthouses back in Scotland, which were built by the family of Robert Louis Stevenson, to weave in some the same DNA as Muckle Flugga. I essentially went on a treasure trail, a scavenge, to find the right lighthouse, but then the same Bill Drummond invited me to come up to deliver a show on the island of Unst. A guy came along to that show and invited us all to his house for brunch. We were staying in this old decommissioned RAF base and it was pretty freaky so a brunch invite was an interesting offer. And when we arrived, there was the Muckle Flugga Shore Station.
Did you know straight away?
It was an incredible experience and I went on a big behemoth of a walk, right up to the headlands which are called Hermaness and Saxa Vord, and as looked off to the distance, there was Muckle Flugga lighthouse, like the last giant at the end of the earth. I thought that’s where those boys have to be. By having the characters on an island it becomes a cauldron, a mixing pot, for all the conflict, tenderness, desires, loss, and ruminations – they’re all massively amplified by the intensity of the environment and by the fact that they’re always forced back together. There’s only so much escaping and avoidance they can do.
I also wanted to set Muckle Flugga in a timeless period. There’s no date in the book. You know it’s after Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1893 because he comes back as a ghost, and you know, it’s before they automated the lighthouse in the 1990s. But hopefully there’s not too much within that scale that would pinpoint it to a year or even a decade. As soon as you know what else is going on in the world, you have political agendas coming in, and you’re thinking about whether you would be alive, whether your relatives would be alive, if there’s a World War going on, who’s ruling the country, and all of a sudden an intricate socio- economic dynamic takes over the story.
I always says the equivalent of Muckle Flugga in the novel, might be Mont Saint-Michel, the fantasy castle in France. Or whatever your favourite Gothic building is, whether it’s Gormenghast or Hogwarts or any of those buildings. If they got together, literally got their rocks off one night in an island-based orgy, my Muckle Flugga would be the love child that came out the other end. It’s a shape shifter.
You’ve written and performed as a poet for so long, was it just as natural to write in the novel form? Is it a different part of your brain or do you feel like it’s all a continuum?
I guess there’s two elements to that. I love the literature that exists in those weird realms in between. Some of my favourite poetry is prose poetry, and some of my favourite prose is poetic prose, and where do those two cross over? The genrefication of them is almost managerial. The story comes first. I’m all for abandoning your notions of genre and just following the story.
Every form of prose I write is called poetic prose, or here is a novel written by a poet. I don’t think I’ll ever escape the poeticisms, and there is a mellifluous poetic nature to the book. I also don’t think I’m able to write in another way- Bukowski or Hemingway I am not! I love adjectives. I love kooky language.
But actually I planned the novel almost like a script. During lockdown I was exploring some scriptwriting with the amazing UK TV director Robert McKillop, who’s currently doing the new season of Slow Horses. I was tutored in what it was like to write a script, how to get character and location happening – the driving engine of the story- before you let yourself write any of the poetic events. So I adopted that approach and I knew where my story was going. I always say Muckle Flugga is a novel based on a script that never got written for a film that never got made. I don’t think they teach that on creative writing courses, and it’s a cockamamie way to write a book, but I was flying by the seat of my pants and it worked for me.
So will you and Muckle Flugga be at Edinburgh International Book Festival this year?
I did a big launch for the book last year- I was interviewed by the actor Russell Tovey and then Australia’s Reuben Kaye came on and did a complimentary performance to finish the show. But this year at the book festival I’ll be sharing stages and spaces with some of my favourite people from the Holly McNish to Douglas Stuart and beyond.
I am really excited that I’m going to chair the Edinburgh book launch for Kae Tempest’s new novel Having Spent Life Seeking on 18th August. I love Kae. We used to have the same editor, Alexa von Hirschberg at Faber & Faber. Kae had done On Connection I’d done Boy Friends so we were in a sort of literary coddle together. The new novel’s amazing and I’m chuffed to have a blurb on the cover. I know Kae has built a dynamic performance out of the novel, which I do sometimes as well, so there’s a real synergy there.
I’ve been intrinsically involved in the book festival for over 10 years and now we have a new site called the Edinburgh Futures Institute at Edinburgh University. It’s an amazing outdoors and indoors space.
I guess I’ve always been tethered to the book festival, and I’m happy to be.
You’re also famously the Makar of Edinburgh – the city’s official Poet Laureate. How does that role intersect with the festival?
Last year I wrote a poem about festivals which I performed as part of the First Minister’s Edinburgh Festivals Opening Ceremony at the end of July. It’s called Ceud Mìle Fàilte which means a hundred thousand welcomes. Nicola Benedetti, the Festival Director of the Edinburgh International Festival was a big part of that commission and presentation. So there’s things like that I get involved in.
I’ll always agree to chair a couple of events or host a couple of writers in my role as Edinburgh Makar. I take the obligation seriously to showcase and champion artists that come to Edinburgh.
You must be such a celebrity in Edinburgh. Can you walk down the street without getting stopped a hundred times?
It’s a small city, so that is on my favour, and I am tall with quite a bouffant, so I do stick out from that perspective. In Edinburgh, more than anywhere else, I meet lots of people that have read my books or came to poetry events. We also had a publishing house and a record label, so I’m known as a lover, an endorser, and an advocate of the arts. I’m split because I’m often down at Holly’s in Cambridge, and that’s where I get all my writing done because I know nobody there. I go away and write in the libraries, especially after all the sociality of Edinburgh and London and the festivals. I hideaway in Cambridge, ride my bicycle up the River Cam and write everything that I need to write in those gaps in between. It’s about taking that sociality – meeting audiences and doing shows – and then fully withdrawing from that, and almost vigilantly fighting for all those scraps of solitude and alienation and quietness and rumination that’s in between, because none of it works without the writing being good enough, and that takes time.
August in Edinburgh is this melting pot of so many different festivals and so many different people.
There’s the film festival, the comedy festival, the book festival, the international festival, the jazz festival, the TV festival. I don’t allow myself to leave. I could be offered…I don’t know… exciting things, and I would not be anywhere else. The fact that I’m there also as a sort of literary representative of my city, as a chair, as a host, as a reader, as an audience member, as a fan, there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be in the month of August.
So can you give us your Irresistible top tips for Edinburgh in festival season?
OK- fast food on the go! Got to keep energised!
Right in the centre of town, there’s a place called The Mosque Kitchen. Close to Edinburgh’s biggest Mosque and near where loads of the shows are going on. They have fresh Indian canteen style food, which is just amazing. It’s cheap, it’s delicious.
For higher end – small plates and wine – one of my best friends from High School is the Head Chef at an amazing place called The Black Grape on the Royal Mile. That’s where I take people when I’m celebrating.
When I was Writer-in-Residence at the University, that’s where I took Alan Cumming, Nichola Sturgeon and Shirley Manson whenever we’d done a talk. The food and the service is exceptional, and someone I really care about has crafted everything with artistic panache.
For a fun dive bar cocktail experience there’s Paradise Palms. There’s nowhere better in Edinburgh. It’s chintzy, it’s fun, it’s incredible.
There’s an amazing speakeasy bar called Panda & Sons, which is hidden behind what looks like a barber shop door. They’re higher end, slower cocktails.
Anything else to keep going?
I would say time your shows well. Keep energy levels up. Commit diligently, but don’t overcommit. You got to have those gulps of air in between the shows to think about them, to ruminate on them, and everyone gets fatigued after a while.
The beautiful thing about Edinburgh is that it’s built on these volcanic crag and tails. The castle sits on an extinct volcano. If you go to the bottom, to the Royal Mile, and look up, there’s our Arthur’s Seat. Spend a bit of time walking around that incredible, vertiginous, volcanic parkland and just percolate all your thoughts. It’s a beautiful place to be, to sit and stare at the lochs and the ducks for a while.
So many cities have great parklands in them. London has Hyde Park, New York has Central Park- they’re beautiful but flat and man-made. Whereas this is just a big eruption of rock and landmass that I think textualises everything you’re thinking about with a sort of brilliant ancientness.
If you walk far enough, there’s a beautiful ancient settlement called Duddingston Village. There’s a pub there called the Sheep Heid Inn, it’s Scotland’s oldest, and I used to work as a skittle boy there when I was wee, popping out from the hatch, and putting the skittles back up. It’s got a really beautiful beer garden with a place called Dr. Neil’s garden beside it. It feels like a sanctuary away from the bustle, but 25 minutes later, you can be back in amongst it.
What about some favourite music that sings Edinburgh to you?
Garbage are a huge band for me. I do a lot with Shirley Manson- she’s hosted a book launch for me. Garbage are about to do a big concert at Edinburgh Castle in July so I wrote a kind of love letter to Shirley for the front cover of arts magazine The List. I probably lean into one on their new album, and I want to go for a positive one, so they’ve got a track called Love to Give, which I love. My first favourite garbage track is #1 Crush, which is also on the album of Romeo and Juliet, the Baz Luhrmann film, which as an early teen I used to watch getting quite soppy about the world.
There’s an amazing Edinburgh band that I can’t stop shouting about called Young Fathers. They won the Mercury Prize. They’ve been in the top 10 in the UK. They’ve done singles with Massive Attack. They’re a mix of hip hop, gospel, African influences, Scottish influences, all smorgasborded together. For me, they’re the best live act in the world at this point in time. I’ll go for their tack Rain Or Shine, which you’ll get a bit of both of in Edinburgh
I write so much about friendship and one of the main impetuses for that is losing my best friend Scott Hutchison, who was a singer in one of my favourite bands Frightened Rabbit. There are so many great songs, but the one called Holy is one I can’t help of thinking of as the soundtrack to the city.
