This weekend I’m chairing two events at the Winter Words book festival in Pitlochry. The authors have a couple of things in common. They both come from the Northern Isles, one from Orkney, one from Shetland. And they are both, in their own ways, extraordinarily courageous.
We’ll be meeting at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, perched above the River Tummel, a few hundred yards downstream of the Loch Faskally dam and salmon ladder, with views across the river to Ben y Vrackie, looming behind the town. Seventy five years ago the theatre began life here as a tent in a field. Today it is under the artistic directorship of the actor Alan Cumming, whose end-of-festival DJ set last year set the place alight. This weekend it will be buzzing.
Amy Liptrot is known for her best-selling memoir The Outrun, recently dramatised as a movie starring the Irish-American actor Saoirse Ronan (she pronounces her name ‘sursha’). Amy grew up on a smallholding on the rugged western coast of Mainland, the largest of the Orkney islands. Her father was bi-polar and schizophrenic, her mother an evangelical Christian.
Moving to London in her early twenties, Amy fell into a decade-long spiral of alcoholism. At the point where her life had completely disintegrated, she bravely returned to her roots and, one might say, the root of her troubles, Orkney. Here the wild landscape and natural world helped her on her journey to recovery, and fuelled the writing of a powerful and beautiful memoir.
Jen Stout is a Shetland-born journalist who found herself in Russia at the time of the invasion of Ukraine. Russian-speaking, but unaccredited, unsupported, unequipped, unprepared she made her way into Ukraine and during the first year of the war reported on the human stories she encountered as she travelled alone around the traumatised country.
Night Train to Odesa is her award-winning account of her journey to the frontline, the dangers she faced, the remarkable people she met along the way, and the friendships she made in a society enduring horrors unimaginable in twenty-first century Europe.
Both books might have made for disturbing, even depressing, reading. But The Outrun is far from being a misery memoir, and Night Train to Odesa is far from conventional war reporting.
Amy Liptrot is a wonderful observer, a joiner-of-the-dots she finds in the Orcadian land-, sea- and skyscapes to create metaphors for her own slow healing. She has remarkable compassion for herself and all around her, and a softly-voiced but steely determination to get well. It is impossible not to warm to her, not least for the honesty, and sometimes humour, with which she tells her story.
Jen Stout is also a fine and equally compassionate observer, whose personal response to the destruction of a country she knows and loves is as heart-wrenching as that of the people whose stories she tells. It’s this deeply felt connection that gives her courage and drives her into the most dangerous of situations in pursuit of the truth.
I could make a guess that their shared experience of island upbringing, of the importance of community in remote places, of rugged landscapes, of closeness to nature and wild weather, play into the way both writers tell their stories.
But at a more basic level than that it seems to me that these are two women whose hearts have been blown wide open by adversity. In the full knowledge of their own strengths and frailties, they steep their stories in an embracing humanity, in the kindnesses shown to them and by them, in the power of simple human decency and love that allows people to survive in the most appalling of circumstances.
A powerful antidote to the hatred and moral disintegration that surrounds us today, these are the inspirational stories of two writers I will be privileged to spend time with over the next couple of days.
Pictured: Saoirse Ronan as Amy Liptrot in The Outrun. And for an hour of pure enchantment listen here to Jen Stout in conversation with her cousin, fellow Shetlander and internationally known fiddler/violinist and composer, Chris Stout, as they walk round the small island of Mousa, an uninhabited nature reserve off the coast of Shetland.
A Few Kind Words 