Poems, Stories and Writings

Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. 'In a documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, draws on Tait's three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.

Margaret Tait was a filmmaker and writer. She published three books of poetry and two collections of short stories (one of them for children), and made thirty-two short films and the feature-length Blue Black Permanent (1992). She was born in Orkney in 1918. After qualifying in medicine at Edinburgh University in 1941, she joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya, before returning to Orkney in 1946. She then studied in Italy, learning Italian at Perugia's School for Foreigners and, from 1950 to 1952 studying filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. On her return to Scotland, Tait established her own film company, Ancona Films, in Edinburgh. In the 1960s she moved back to her native Orkney where she continued to make films until her death in 1999.