n TWO Scottish publications with Scottish themes have jointly won the seventh Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize. They are The Summer Walkers by Timothy Neat (Canongate, #14.99) and Mingulay - An Island and its People by Ben Buxton (Birlinn, #10.99).
The authors will share the prize, worth #4000, which is administered by a trust established by the late Ruth Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff, a
German-born writer and folklorist who settled in Scotland in 1930s and died in 1989. It is awarded annually for an important contribution by an individual to the study of folklore and folklife.
The Summer Walkers documents the vanishing world of Scotland's nomads - the indigenous, Gaelic-speaking travelling people who made their living on the road as tinsmiths, hawkers, horse-dealers, and pearl-fishers.
The book is a collection of stories, poems, songs and anecdotes, mostly supplied to the author orally by the travellers themselves.
Mingulay - an Island and its People documents a world which has already vanished. It investigates the neglected story of a Hebridean island which shared St Kilda's fate; which had a population of 160 in the last century and, by 1912, was deserted, the last islanders leaving by voluntary evacuation.
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