fiona ritchie walker
Fiona Ritchie Walker
Writer and Poet
Fiona Ritchie Walker is a Scots-born writer of poetry, short stories and flash fiction. Born in Montrose (her mother’s home town) she’s now based in Bournville, Birmingham (where her father grew up) after many years in NE England.
A former journalist...
she worked for Traidcraft, for many years, travelling the world to help farmers and artisans share how fair trade was making a difference.
Since 1999...
she has published four poetry collections and a pamphlet, with work widely published in anthologies and magazines, including New Writing Scotland, Mslexia, Magma, Amsterdam Quarterly and Postbox magazine.
Her poetry and fiction...
has been placed in many competitions, most recently the Scottish Arts Trust’s Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction, the Scots Poetry Prize in the Julia Budenz Commemorative Poetry Competition (Scottish Poetry Library) and first prize for poetry in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition.
She received a New Writing North Northern Promise Award, is a Hawthornden Fellow and has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University.
Click the icon to read her profile and first placed poem ‘Wumman’.
Click the icon to read her fist placed poem ‘Migration’
Publications and placing
“Mini me” - 2nd Prize, Bristol University’s Secret Life of Data
Read the published anthology here
Amsterdam Quarterly
Two poems published in Amsterdam Quarterly’s On the Move issue can be read online here
Flash Fiction
You can read or hear some of Fiona’s flash fiction here:
Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction 2024
(at 11:30mins)
Selected poems
Lumiere Brothers’ hand-painted film c1899 – dancer unknown
All the bones of her body have gone,
replaced with the ripple of silk.
Seen, unseen.
Everything is now,
making love
to the air around her,
caressing wings billow to a fall,
flame a colour,
watch it die.
Silent music fuels every step,
free form, flying,
sculpted moments
draped over memories,
folding the past into possibilities,
layer upon layer, veiled, revealed,
transcending the stage,
not caring
if anyone is watching.
Published in The Joy of Living (Dreich)
Serpentine
Dance
The Price of Gutted Herring
She found it while searching for traffic news
risking taking her eyes off the road
to drift between stations, would remember
the next morning that somewhere
between Five Lane Ends and Old Man’s Bottom
Newcastle waned and Scotland conquered again.
A cheery voice told of upturned hay loads in Carmyllie,
broken lights in Bearsden and a main road closed
in Kirkintilloch, while she was heading to Catton
and Corbridge and queues on the Western Bypass
but for now, she was pulled in where the signal was strong,
head in hands, listening to the price of gutted herring
and catches unloaded everywhere north and west of there
on cobbled harbours glistening with fish scales,
where men with mobile phones and lilting voices
bid and bid again for cod and mackerel
and all the spoils of the sea that she remembered
miles inland, licking salt tears from fingers,
starting up the engine, trying to keep tuned in until
the voice faded and Radio Newcastle took over again.
Published in the The British Council’s New Writing 11 and widely anthologised.
When the aliens came, they hovered undetected
above polluted skies, took their time
recording readings, analysing day to day
activities, global change, how ancient ways
of living with nature had long ago been lost,
the friendly forms of living, travelling
diminished by human borders, senseless wars.
They saw rivers no longer nourishing the soil,
recorded rising contamination, vast hidden poisons
entering blood streams, destroying warming seas.
Sometimes they found pockets of joy, quiet goodness
happening in the midst of drawn knives, drugs and hate,
but not enough to make them explore more,
stop them from heading home.
Published in Amsterdam Quarterly
Surveillance
Taking Aim
