Welcome

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 with her first poetry collection Voes & Sounds and again in 1999 with Wast Wi Da Valkyries. A third collection, Plain Song, was published in 2002 and Parallel Worlds followed in 2005. One of the poems in this collection, Makkin Sooth Eshaness, won the Rhoda Bulter Prize for Shetland Dialect, 2004.

Christine's poem Seein Baith Sides won the The Shetland Writing Prize prize and also the prize for best poem in Shetland Dialect. She was also featured in the Best Scottish Poems 2006, selected by the author Janice Galloway and won the Prix du Livre insulaire 2007 for her new Bilingual Poetry Collection Mondes Parallèles.

Some of her poems have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Polish, Austrian-German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Welsh, Bengali 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, Kolkata, Paris and at several Breton festivals including the Salon Insulaire on the 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. She has also had fruitful collaborations with artists.

Christine is one of the founders of Hansel Co-operative Press which was established to promote literary and artistic work in Shetland and Orkney.

Christine has also taken part in several BBC radio programmes; a recording of a conversation between Christine and Rina Katajavuori was broadcast on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. It formed part of the With Love From Me To You series. Christine's poems have also been used in the "Something Understood" series on BBC Radio 4.