The Scotsman 30 November 2022

When Ross MacKay was a boy, he loved nothing more than to write. He was not sporty, but give him a blank piece of paper and he was away. He filled a folder with stories set in an imagined world and squirrelled them away beneath his bed where no one would see them. “I never shared them – I don’t even think my parents would know about that,” he says.

Now all grown up and a parent himself, MacKay finds himself forever drawn back to that realm of the imagination. He did it with Tortoise In A Nutshell, the object-theatre company he co-founded after graduating from Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University, specialising in visual experimentation. He does it in the poetry he writes for young readers, with titles such as Who Put Mums And Dads In Charge? And he did it with his recently published novel, Will And The Whisp, a fantasy about a boy bound to an unearthly spirit. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).