James McGonigal is a poet and editor, formerly a schoolteacher, teacher educator and educational researcher. He has combined writing poetry with professional publications in children’s language and literacy. He was co-editor of New Writing Scotland and of several literary anthologies, and a founding editor of SCROLL (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) for Brill. As biographer and literary executor of the poet Edwin Morgan, he has published widely on his poetry and translations, including selections of his letters and uncollected prose, and a critical introduction for high school students. His biography Beyond the Last Dragon: A life of Edwin Morgan was the 2011 Saltire Scottish Research Book of the Year. His own poetry has appeared widely in magazines and in several chapbooks from Mariscat Press and full collections from Red Squirrel Press, most recently Life Sentences (2023). His trilingual chapbook Passage / An Pasaíste (2004) won the Deric Bolton Long Poem Award, and Cloud Pibroch (2010) won the first Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Award. He is Professor Emeritus of English in Education at Glasgow University.
