Island in the Sound

The Island in the Sound, the third collection by South Uist poet Niall Campbell, creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history. The Sound of the title has a double meaning, both a thing that might be heard but also a body of water between islands or mainland, from the Norse word Sund. These poems rise up, then, as moments of clarity lifted out of all the noise and music and speech-patterns of our present world. Here, mirroring the islands’ precarious future, we uncover strange links to Rome falling, Lindisfarne, and the temporary heaven found in Alamut, North Iran. The waters that churn around the islands in the poems bring strange things to their shores: saints, remnants of various types of havens, crab-boxes, and figures from the working-class lives of Uist. It is a poetry collection attuned to the growing sense that something is changing around us and there never will be a going back. These islands in the sound are what’s left: shaped, crafted, riven by the strange tuneful sea they sprang from.

Niall Campbell’s first collection, Moontide (2014), won both the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year Award as well as being shortlisted for three other major prizes. His second collection, Noctuary (2019), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. The Island in the Sound is longlisted for the Highland Book Prize. Born and raised on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, Niall Campbell now lives in Fife.

Niall Campbell was born in 1984 on the island of South Uist, one of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. He now lives in Fife. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and an Arvon-Jerwood Mentorship in 2013, and won the Poetry London Competition in 2013. His first book-length collection, Moontide (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), won what was then Britain’s biggest poetry prize, the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, as well as the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; it was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. First Nights: poems, a selection from Moontide with additional new poems, was published by Princeton University Press in the US in 2016. His second book-length collection, Noctuary (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection. His third full collection, The Island in the Sound (2024), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025 and Scotland's Poetry Book of the Year in The Saltires: Scotland's National Book Awards 2025, and longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2024. He wrote the libretto for Draught, an opera by Anna Appleby, which was performed by the BBC Philharmonic in 2022. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus performed Jay Capperauld’s setting of his poem ‘The Night Watch’ (from Noctuary) in 2026. He is Editor of Poetry London.