Conversations with Scottish Poets presents fourteen interviews conducted by Italian literary critic and translator Marco Fazzini since the 1980s. By asking the same or similar questions of Scottish poets of different generations, the interviews provide insight both into the ideas and working methods of the individual poets and also into the ways in which the poets’ relationship with their country and its languages have changed between the twentieth and twenty first centuries.
The poets interviewed are Norman MacCaig, Sorley Maclean, Edwin Morgan, Derick Thomson, Iain Crichton Smith, Alasdair Gray, Kenneth White, Douglas Dunn, Valerie Gillies, Christopher Whyte, John Burnside, David Kinloch, Robert Crawford and Don Paterson. The. interviews are illustrated with portraits of the poets by Italian artists Franco Dugo, Paolo Annibali, Nicola Nannini and Doriano Scazzosi.

Marco Fazzini teaches at the Department of Linguistic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Ca' Foscari, Italy. His major poetry books include: Nel vortice (1999); XX poesie (2007); Driftings and Wrecks (2010); and 24 Selected Poems by Marco Fazzini (2014).