Stuart Campbell has previously written for the BBC, the

Guardian

,

The Big Issue

and

Scottish Book Collector

. He is the editor of

RLS in Love

, an anthology of Robert Louis Stevenson’s love poetry, and author of

John McPake and The Sea Beggars

, a novel set in Leith and sixteenth-century Holland. He has also written a second novel,

The Aeronaut’s Guide to Rapture

, and two travelogues,

Boswell’s Bus Pass

and

Daniel Defoe’s Railway Journey

. He is an obsessive book collector and recently represented The Republic of Ireland at walking football. His latest novel,

The Woman Clothed With The Sun

,tells the extraordinary true-life story of Elspeth Buchan and the Buchanites, an eighteenth-century Scottish apocalyptic sect based in Galloway at the time of Robert Burns. In this talk he will discuss the research undertaken in Dumfries and Galloway in search of the Buchanities and the difficulties involved in fictionalising such an extraordinary tale.