Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Mackay, Shena

Mackay, Shena

Shena Mackay was born in Scotland, and now regrets having changed her name from Mackey to Mackay when her first book was published in 1964. A collection of her stories, Dancing on the Outskirts, was published in 2015.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

The Atmospheric Railway, [26] 86; articles by, [48] 80

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20100601095827

Sunsets and Suburbia

Linda Leatherbarrow on Shena Mackay, The Atmospheric Railway

Shortly after I began teaching on the creative writing programme at Middlesex University, Shena Mackay was appointed as our Honorary Visiting Professor. Her inaugural lecture in 2001 was titled A Horror of Sunsets: The Writer’s Palette and the Enemies of the Imagination. This referred to a line from Proust: ‘I have a horror of sunsets: they’re so romantic, so operatic.’ I’ve never got on with opera myself, not being able to let the music sweep me past the banality of the plots, but I knew at once I would get on with Shena Mackay. Her subject was synaesthesia, a condition from which she suffers, if ‘suffers’ is the right word. I suspect not – ‘inhabits’, perhaps. In her case, it means seeing words or individual letters in colours.
20151201160742 James B. W. Lewis - Shena Mackay on Alfred Ollivant, Owd Bob

One Man and His Dog

Shena Mackay on Alfred Ollivant, Owd Bob

My raddled copy of Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir, with its broken spine and pages falling out, sits in my bookcase alongside other lifelong companions such as Come Hither (which I was delighted to see featured in Issue 43 of Slightly Foxed), but as an adult I feared to open it, because I had once loved it so much. I never knew who wrote it since the title page was missing and the wording on the spine was obliterated by brown sticky tape, until some years ago I mentioned it to my bibliophile brother-in-law, who came up with the author’s name – Alfred Ollivant.

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