Poetry for me is a compass, a crutch, an anthem of survival – both pop banger and folksy suave. It is the means by which I have learnt to investigate this world. I’d be a feartie without it, stupefied and sluggish, lighter in both courage and joy.

I didn’t grow up with writers in the family, no “professionals” or academics; no one summoned me into literature. All the same, I didn’t have to look far for supreme storytellers. At every family gathering, yarn makers were rife – lurking in the kitchen pouring stiff drinks or out on the back step stealing puffs beneath the starlight. My big and bustling family included hairdressers, nursery nurses, plumbers, mechanics, cleaners, grifters of all sorts, several of whom could turn tails and crack quips with bravura. I always had to have my wits about me and a kit-bag of comebacks at the ready.

My Edinburgh high school was not particularly conducive to a love of poetry – I had to be sneaky with it. The eight-story tower block, often labelled an eyesore, was once Europe’s biggest state school. Suffice to say, my love of churning the lexical butters was not the hippest of hobbies to tout around the corridors. I kept it schtum.

My friends, however, got wind of the fact I wrote poetry and hunted for my notepad like zombies with a taste for blood. When eventually they uncovered the bulging pad stuffed down the neck of my (rarely used) golf bag, I took an almighty ribbing. I was outed as an angst-ridden poem writer and throbbed with humiliation. But then this beautiful thing happened: it became old news, and I could go about my poetry business relatively unencumbered; provided, you know, I didn’t flaunt it or try to convert anyone. I was able to get on with living a fuller and more fulfilled existence by having poetry in my corner, helping me translate my teenage trials into verses that made them bearable. Clawing life, and love, back from the ashes of a teenybopper’s tumult.

I was able to get on with living a fuller and more fulfilled existence by having poetry in my corner

Fast forward a few years into the future and I’m made Edinburgh’s youngest ever Makar (or poet laureate). The first thing I did was to quest around a heap of the city’s state schools and have a mass “fessing up” to liking poetry. Summon into the room a collective moving past the awkward stages of it becoming known you dabbled with a stanza – do away with watching out for the wolves that might well tear shreds out of that. And it worked, insomuch as we got heaps of entries in for the poetry competition I launched alongside these talks and workshops. Of course, an indulgent prize including a plush meal and cinema vouchers, as well as the expected book tokens, helped lure more folk to throw their ink in the ring (whatever emotional permission the young team need to give themselves to enter is braw by me).

See, having a place for poetry, an invitation into it, is so supremely crucial. A competition or a day is good, but a month – a full-throttle month-long fandango of a program – now that really puts it on the radar.

Telling the youth of Scotland that poetry has taken me all over the world: Tokyo to New York, Barcelona to Bali, Toronto to Copenhagen, Cape Town to Sydney, always helps get their attention. It’s a risk because I’ve been so fortunate for poetry to have taken me that far and such globetrotting is by no means guaranteed, but I don’t want to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm either. And it’s all true. It happened for me sitting in the same crappy plastic chairs those kids were sitting in (I did visit my old school, at least the new incarnation of it: the ogre of a building that housed us having been dutifully demolished), so why not for them?

These experiences have ameliorated me both as a writer and a human. Having had the opportunity to share stages, pages, confabs, vistas, with some of the world’s foremost word slingers has been incalculable in its preciousness.

As to the Australia in question, having recently journeyed back from Sydney Writers’ Festival (as part of a month-long tour of Australia and New Zealand), I’m ringing loud with appreciation. It was one of the most salient and enthralling trips of my life.

My introduction to Australian poetry began way back in 2016 with an antipodean exchange hosted by the Scottish Poetry Library – it involved myself and another Scottish writer being teamed up with Luka Lessons and (the newly crowned Miles Franklin Award winner!) Omar Musa. Together we conjured a scratch show at the Scottish Poetry Library and then a full-blown blazer of an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It was a startling first encounter and, since then, Omar and I have read and toured together in several countries across the world – sharing bunk beds and laksas along the way.

I managed to find myself briefly in Brisbane for the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2018, and got a sip of the lustre to be had there, but it was a jet-lagged 48 hours en route to New Zealand and so was too brief a dalliance to affiliate myself with the wonder of the Oz.

May 2026, however, was different – my reckoning. Appearing at SWF felt like riding the crescendo of a poetic wave across the world. Participating in the SWF Festival Opening Gala on the first night and then appearing at the Poetry Gala the next night was a dreamy way to unfurl upon this extraordinary city that I was encountering for the very first time. Sharing the stage with Omar all these years later felt spicy in its nostalgic splendour, but also getting to marinate in the brilliance of Maxine Beneba Clarke, Evelyn Araluen, David Stavanger, Kirli Saunders and beyond, was akin to arriving in the epicentre of a great Australian poetry rhumba.

That said, I hope this is still me in my fledging run of this Australian poetry voyage. I am thankful for the sapience, the stories, the deep and dazzling insights, which thrum in my bones from all these encounters. Haste ye back … or rather, me to you.

Michael Pedersen is the Edinburgh Makar (poet laureate) and is part of Poetry Month 2026, which runs across Australia in August.