Forthcoming events
August Event - Author Evening with Liz Macrae Shaw on 18 August 2025
This event is free to attend,
and is offered in person and on Zoom
Refreshments will be available
To attend in person, please book here
https://www.trybooking.com/uk/FDYN
so that we can send you a code for the side entrance to WASPS.
To attend via Zoom, please email highlandlit.com@gmail.com by 12 noon on 18 August: we will send you a link to the event.
Liz Macrae Shaw
Liz Macrae Shaw is a Skye-based author, who has a lifelong fascination with the island’s stark beauty, family stories, traditional music and Gaelic culture. Her mother was Skye-born, but Liz was brought up in England where she studied history at Oxford, and subsequently had two satisfying careers in England, firstly as a history lecturer in a Further Education College and secondly as a counsellor and therapist.
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She now lives on Skye and has published three earlier novels – Love and Music will Endure, No Safe Anchorage, and Had we never loved so blindly.
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The second surge of the sea: the circle of time
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At the HighlandLIT event on 18th August, Liz will be discussing her new historical novel, recently published with the Islands Book Trust - The second surge of the sea: the circle of time.
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The Island Book Trust website describes the book:
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Instead of enjoying her summer holiday in the 1960s with her friends in the south of England, the disgruntled teenager Margaret finds herself banished to stay with her grandparents on the Isle of Skye. However, she discovers an unexpected kinship with her grandfather as he gradually reveals the story of his early life on the island before and during the First World War. An extraordinary tale of adventure, danger and betrayal is brought to life.
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The novel also contains much social history about life in Skye during the 20th century.
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Liz writes:
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Some of the characters in the story have been inspired by my own family history and photographs, such as the images shown on the back cover of my grandmother Dolina MacRae (née Nicolson), her brother Murdo Nicolson, and the iconic Skye terrier.
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The title is a reference to ‘An Ataireachd Ard’ (‘The Surge of the Sea’), a beautiful Gaelic song about the pain of exile and loss that hails from the Isle of Lewis in the Western Isles.
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Anne Lorne Gillies writes in ‘Songs of Gaelic Scotland’ how ‘the sea, since time immemorial a source of sustenance to the people, also took people away, never to return.’ ‘The second surge’ refers to the power of storytelling to return the tide of memory.
Hybrid HighlandLIT events: privacy note
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In order to facilitate access to events from HighlandLIT members and friends across the Highlands they will be livestreamed on Zoom. It will be visible only to those who have requested the URL.
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The camera may pan across the audience at the venue at times during the event. Please note that in attending the event you are deemed to be accepting this procedure, unless you tell us at the start, in which case you can sit in a part of the audience which the camera will avoid.
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