Rab Wilson was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. As a Scots poet, his work appears regularly in
The Herald as well as
Chapman, Lallans and
Markings magazines.
Rab has performed his work at the Edinburgh Festival, the StAnza poetry festival at St Andrews, the ‘Burns an a’ That Festival’ at Ayr and has been ‘Bard of the Festival’ at Wigtown, Scotland’s National Booktown. Additionally Rab is a previous winner of the McCash Poetry Prize and in the past eighteen months was ‘Robert Burns Writing Fellow – In Reading Scots’ for Dumfries and Galloway Region. Currently a member of the National Committee for the Scots Language Resource Centre, Rab regularly attends the parliamentary Cross Party Group for Scots language held at Holyrood. He is a ‘weel-kent’ advocate for Scots writing. He has recently moved back to New Cumnock, where he now lives with his wife Margaret and daughter Rachel.
