Collier Laddie with Rab Wilson

It is now forty years on from the 1984–85 UK Miners’ Strike and Rab Wilson – a former miner deeply engaged in the strike –examines through his mining poems and strike diary the social and economic challenges that Scotland faced then and faces now.

Rab knows from hard-won experience what it was like to work in the mining industry. He toiled in it for eight year and this a powerful first-hand testimony of what it was like to take part in this era-defining strike. It also provides a historical insight into what was to be the dying days of Scotland’s mining industry. This event will have a powerful resonance for those who have lived through the decline of heavy industry in Scotland including Clydeside ship-building and the corresponding loss of a particular way of life. Collier Laddie is a testimony to working class solidarity and resilience.

RAB WILSON is one of Scotland’s most accomplished poets. He was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. Rab writes in Scots and his work appears regularly in The Herald, Chapman, Lallans and Markings magazines and he is the author of a number of highly praised volumes of poetry and a Burns scholar. He is a winner of the McCash Poetry Prize and was ‘Robert Burns Writing Fellow – In Reading Scots’ for Dumfries and Galloway Region. He is the Scriever in Residence for the National Trust for Scotland based at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayr. Currently a member of the National Committee for the Scots Language Resource Centre, Rab regularly attends the parliamentary Cross Party Group for Scots language held at Holyrood.

This event is supported by Book Week Scotland 2024 event funding.