Unco: LGBT+ Scots Glossar
29th November 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM GMT
Unco is a project to create a new Scots lexicon of LGBT+ words. Developed with LGBT+ Scots speakers, Unco reaches into the Scots language kist o riches and making new words where they’re needed. These words are a proposal for how LGBT+ people can talk about themselves in Scots, and are offered as a gift to the future.
This event marks the launch of the lexicon with a specially-commissioned spoken word and music performance from Harry Josephine Giles and Malin Lewis. Weaving old and new language together with old and new sounds, these two artists explore queer identities, histories and creative futures.
The performance will be followed by a discussion with the artists about their approach to creating art that connects Scottish tradition with ideas that look to the future, and on the process of creating the lexicon.
Speaker Biographies
Malin Lewis is a trans bagpiper, fiddler, instrument maker and award winning composer. One of Scotland’s most exciting innovators, Malin melds Scottish west coast tradition with a newly invented, self-made bagpipe. Hair tingling, philosophical and dance inducing melodies inspired by European folk traditions, humans, queerness and the universe. Through their work, Malin explores the space between the gender binary; a space with its own colourful and unique culture. Malin’s unique sound is born from the deep connection that comes with making and composing for their own instrument. Recently they have been touring with Making Tracks international residency, recording film music in Berlin, learning the tradition of the extinct Finnish Bagpipes and composing for theatre and contemporary dance from Manchester to Bern.
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Her latest book is the poetry collection Them! (Picador 2024). Her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador 2021) won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. Her poetry collections The Games (Out-Spoken Press, 2018) and Tonguit (Freight Books 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her stage show of her poetry sequence Drone toured internationally in 2019, and the performance of Deep Wheel Orcadia will tour in 2025. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling.
Ashley Douglas is a multi-lingual historian, writer, translator and consultant, specialising in the Scots language and LGBT+ history. She has worked with and written for a range of national heritage and literary organisations, including the National Library of Scotland, Historic Scotland, Time for Inclusive Education, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the British Library. She recently consulted on Katherine: James V, the latest installment in Rona Munro’s “The James Plays” series.
Ashley has written an original LGBT+ inclusive children’s book in Scots (“The Lass and the Quine”, forthcoming 2025). She is currently working on her first full-length book (forthcoming 2026): a historical biography of 16th-century figure Marie Maitland, “Scotland’s 16th-century Sappho”, who lived an all-round remarkable life as a woman in that era and who is especially significant as the author of among the earliest known lesbian love poetry (written in Scots) since Sappho herself.
