Our next Shore Poets event will celebrate the last ever Mark Ogle Memorial Award (MOMA). Over twelve years, the award has commissioned work from some of the UK’s finest poets. Their poems have been gathered together in a pamphlet of all the stimulus and response poems. Watching Sunlight will be launched at the event, with copies available for a donation to a cancer charity.
Please join us on Saturday March 2nd, at the Cornerstone Centre, St John’s to hear the 2019 winner of the Mark Ogle Memorial Award: Jim McGonigal.
Jim will be joined on stage by previous winners: Anna Crowe, Vicki Feaver and Tom Pow. Angus Peter Campbell hopes to be with us, as does Meg Bateman, if the tide is right. Music will be provided by Shore Poets favourites, The Whole Shebang.
Please note the different day, time and venue:
- Saturday 2nd March, 7.30pm – 9.45pm
- The Cornerstone Centre, St John’s (at the junction of Princes Street & Lothian Road).
- Admission: £5 (includes a drink and some nibbles)
MARK OGLE (1948-1999)
Mark was one of the earliest members of Shore Poets and one of the first to read at the group’s original venue, the Shore Gallery in Leith. His untimely death left his considerable poetic talent under-realised. His family decided to commission an annual award in which a poet, selected from the poets who had read at Shore Poets in the previous season, responded to one of Mark’s poems.

The Mark Ogle Memorial Award
JIM McGONIGAL
His poetry includes the prize-winning Passage/An Pasaíste (2004) and Cloud Pibroch (2010), both from Mariscat Press, and The Camphill Wren (2016) from Red Squirrel Press. His most recent work is Turning Over in a Strange Bed (Mariscat Press, 2017). His biography Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan (2012) won a Saltire Award, and he co-edited The Midnight Letterbox (Carcanet Press, 2016), a selection of the poet’s correspondence 1950–2010.
ANNA CROWE (winner 2013)

photo credit: Swithun Crowe
VICKI FEAVER (winner 2016)
TOM POW (winner 2012)
and hopefully…
ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL (inaugural winner 2008)
MEG BATEMAN (winner 2014)
MUSIC: THE WHOLE SHEBANG
The Whole Shebang is an Edinburgh-based collective, formed in 2011, who play good-time music, from show tunes and standards through blues, country and western to contemporary pop.
The full line-up is: Kerry Houston (vocals), Fiona Shivas (vocals), Gail Turpin (vocals), Frank Glynn (fiddle and viola), Doug Govan (guitar and ukelele), Al Gray (bass), Bill Haddow (mandolin), and Hamish Whyte (percussion).