Cove Park’s Literature Residency supports an established writer based in Scotland or the UK at a key stage in their work. We offer the writer time and space to pursue a project or new ways of working free from the pressure of specified outcomes, in a changing community of artists across a range of art-forms, career stages and nationalities. Recent Literature Residents include Ellen Aaku, Marion Coutts, Helen Cross, Gerry Cambridge, Mikey Cuddihy, Rachel Cusk, Jennie Erdal, Jessica Fox, John Glenday, Rachel Holmes, Russell Celyn Jones, Tom Pow, Jess Richards, Jo Shapcott, Zoe Strachan, Louise Welsh, Nicola White and Susan Wicks.

Alison Irvine’s novel This Road is Red (Luath 2011) was based on interviews with residents of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats and was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. Her collaboration with photographer Chris Leslie and artist Mitch Miller, Nothing is Lost (Freight 2015), won the Scottish Design Awards Grand Prix. This was a Glasgow Life commission to record the impact of the 2014 Commonwealth Games on residents of Glasgow’s East End. She collaborates regularly with Leslie and Miller as Recollective  and their practice involves documenting the stories and memories of people in relation to the places in which they live and work.  Most recently they have been Artists in Residence for Falkirk Townscape Heritage Initiative.

Her work in Recollective feeds nicely into her independent fiction projects and she is currently writing a novel based on interviews with dancers and residents of a sheltered housing complex in Lennoxtown.
Alison is a graduate of Glasgow University’s Creative Writing MLitt (distinction). She was awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writer’s Award in 2007 and has been Scottish Book Trust Reader in Residence for East Dunbartonshire Library Service. She regularly works with libraries, schools, and community groups teaching creative writing.