The Society of Authors (SoA) in Scotland has partnered with Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature and Edinburgh Council to pilot the Mary Ratcliff Writer’s Room, a new two-month programme which offers a writing space to women writers in Edinburgh alongside a £1,000 grant and a year’s free SoA membership.

Earning a living as a writer in Scotland is becoming increasingly difficult, with recent research by Literature Alliance Scotland showing the average writer/literary freelancer’s wage to be just under the Living Wage, at £21,140. The Writer’s Room hopes to nurture promising new talent, by affording the time, space and financial support for writers to work on their projects. The successful candidates will also receive an annual subscription to the SoA, for access to invaluable support with the business of being a writer and contract vetting from our team of advisors, as well as a host of other membership benefits.

The programme’s first instalment had a brilliant turnout, with over 80 writers applying. We are delighted to announce that writers Vivian Jing Ye and Tasneem Maher have accepted posts on the programme, selected by lottery to trial the project.

Tasneem Maher

Tasneem Maher is a Palestinian-Jordanian writer and PhD candidate based in Edinburgh, researching Palestinian speculative writing and poetics. A Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in ‘Poetry Online’, ‘VIBE’, and ‘Porridge’ Magazine, amongst others. She is fiction and personal essays editor at ‘Sumou Magazine’ and she was a programme coordinator for the Unootha Writers’ Program in 2021. You can find her @mythosgal on X.

‘I am so honoured and delighted to get the space and resources to focus on my writing, and I am so excited to have the opportunity to contribute to Edinburgh’s rich literary heritage and culture.’

Vivian Jing Ye

Vivian Jing Ye is a bilingual Chinese writer and performer based in Edinburgh, holding Masters in both Creative Writing with distinction and Comparative Literature. She is a selected artist of the Collective Studio at the Newbridge Project. Vivian also studied as a visiting graduate student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and her work has been shortlisted for the John Byrne Award, featured on BBC Radio, ‘From Glasgow to Saturn’ and elsewhere. You can find her @jingy0109 on Instagram.

‘I was over the moon when I received the news! Having dedicated time and space to focus on writing is a luxury for any writer, and therefore I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity. I’m also excited to connect with fellow writers through the wonderful Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature platform. My bond with this city’s literary heritage goes back to when I was twenty, choosing to study literature here. I told my mother that one of the very reasons I picked Edinburgh was because it is the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, a place where literature is celebrated and deeply cherished by its people, that I longed to experience that enthusiasm firsthand.’

Mary Brown Ratcliff (née Jamieson) (1928 – 2023) was a resident of Edinburgh who derived great joy from Scottish culture, including Scotland’s literary culture, especially since she discovered that the home where she was bringing up her four children was Robert Louis Stevenson’s home from age 3 to 6. Brought up by her widowed mother along with her three siblings in a Council house in Polmont, she went to Falkirk High School, and did several degrees at Edinburgh University, in the Arts, Maths and Medicine, and became a GP. Her interests were wide, ranging over crafts, music-making, theatre, history, reading, astronomy, botany, and most importantly her family – her husband, four children, their partners and her seven grandchildren. Her children have gifted the Mary Ratcliff Writer’s Room as a legacy from her, in the hope and expectation that through this, another great Edinburgh writer will emerge.