Dorothy Alexander

I work in both prose and poetry. My work usually involves some kind of interaction between the two. For my PhD I wrote a prosimetrum (a rhythmic sequence of prose fiction and poetic texts), titled ‘Cage’, in which experimental poetics were used to intuit and disclose the disease processes associated with dementia. Sections of Cage’ are written in Borders Scots. I won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Award in 2002. I am currently working on a project titled ‘The Border Ballad into the Twenty first Century: applying experimental poetics to contemporary narratives in Borders Scots’. The early work for this was done during a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I am also working on a novel that retells the story of the Mauricewood Pit Disaster through the eyes of a young girl whose father is killed there, and writing a series of poems with an ecological theme (titled Final Warning) that take forward variations of found poetry that I developed for ‘Cage’.