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This site was last updated on 20th June, 2008.

New! Christine wins the Prix du Livre insulaire 2007 for her new Bilingual Poetry Collection Mondes Parallèles.

New! Christine is featured in Best Scottish Poems 2006, selected by the author Janice Galloway.

Christine De Luca (née Pearson) was born and brought up in Shetland, spending her formative years in Waas (Walls) on the west side of the mainland. She now lives in Edinburgh. In 1996 she won the Shetland Literary Prize (now discontinued) with her first poetry collection Voes & Sounds and again in 1999, Wast Wi Da Valkyries. A third collection, Plain Song, was launched in Shetland and Edinburgh in 2002. It is accompanied by a CD of the poems, read by the author. These three collections were published by The Shetland Library. A pamphlet, Drops in Time's Ocean, was published by Hansel Co-operative Press, in 2004. It is based on eight generations of Christine's family, on her father's side. Her most recent collection, Parallel Worlds, was published by Luath Press in 2005. One of the poems in this collection, Makkin Sooth Eshaness, won the Rhoda Bulter Prize for Shetland Dialect, 2004. The Shetland Writing Prize is awarded annually for a particular genre of writing. In 2006 it was awarded for poetry. Christine's poem Seein Baith Sides won the overall prize and also the prize for best poem in Shetland Dialect.

Some of her poems have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Polish, Austrian-German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Welsh and even English. She has read her poems at over 150 events including Book and Poetry Festivals, in: Edinburgh, St Andrews, Inverness, Wigtown, Shetland, Finland, Milan, Paris and at the Salon Insulaire on the Breton island of Ouessant.

Her work is also found in numerous literary journals, both national and international and anthologies including The Hand That Sees published by The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, in association with The Scottish Poetry Library. This was a poetry-photography collaboration. She has also had fruitful collaborations with artists.

"Her Shetland poems, written in the beautiful Scots of those islands - a blend of Old Scots and Norn - seemed to hanker for a simple and pure way of life which was marvellously evoked in image and sound .... They are poems with a sense of place, sympathy, commitment to language, the urge to celebrate life itself."
Douglas Lipton Dumfries & Galloway Standard