Aileen Ballantyne is a national newspaper journalist turned poet. Her investigative journalism for the Guardian has twice been commended in the British Press Awards. Her poetry has won a series of recent major awards, including the Mslexia Poetry Prize, Poetry on the Lake at Orta San Giulio, the Scots prize at the Wigtown Poetry Festival, and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Modern Poetry from the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches English and Scottish Literature. Her first poetry collection, Taking Flight (Luath Press), explores flight in all its aspects, and commemorates the Lockerbie disaster in the voices of Lockerbie residents. Reviewing Taking Flight, the poet John Glenday said: ‘Aileen Ballantyne has a rare and natural gift for language… her narratives tell us things we really need to know.’
