✨ Out of the Margins: Centenary Programme – Alexandria ✨ Join @kirstininnes.bsky.social this May at Alexandria Library for free creative writing workshops. Explore setting, character & style across 3 sessions. Limited spaces—book now! 📖✍️
As part of Out of the Margins, we’re hosting events at Alexandria Library celebrating Owens’ life and legacy. Workshops (7,14,21 May), 100th birthday (23 May) & exhibition (23 May–30 Sept). Join us! #agnesowens
🙏
Delighted to share our new short film on Agnes Owens, marking her 2026 centenary, now live on AGA’s YouTube. Discover her life, work, and legacy—or watch it on a retro TV at the Lillie Art Gallery exhibition from today!
So exciting to see these - aren't they beautiful?
❤️
📚 Pre-orders now open! 📚
Polygon’s @birlinn.bsky.social reissued Agnes Owens titles—with new introductions by @danigaravelli.bsky.social Kirsty Logan @kirstininnes.bsky.social and @heatherparry.bsky.social are in our shop. New covers by Joan Eardley. Order via link in bio!
📚 Agnes Owens in the Archives ✨ FREE TALK ✨
23 Apr, 17:30–18:30 | National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
Celebrate Agnes Owens’ centenary and explore her archives with expert speakers @laurzzs.bsky.social @sorchadallas.bsky.social and Dr Colin McIlroy
🎟️ Book via Eventbrite (link in bio)
Centenary Agnes Owens tote with her striking quote, in typewriter-style font. Baby pink, 100% organic cotton. Features Calum Colvin photos. Limited run—pre-order now or buy at events. Link in bio.
Got my ticket. So looking forward to this. It’ll be an amazing celebration of Agnes Owens’ life and work.
Final event in our Milngavie programme for the Agnes Owens centenary ✨ Join a special Curator’s Tour of Out of the Margins with @sorchadallas.bsky.social 12 June, 11:00am, Lillie Art Gallery.
PLEASE SHARE ✨
Celebrate Agnes Owens this spring (Apr–Jun 2026) in Milngavie & Alexandria. Join the Polygon launch + live event (9 May, 4–6:30pm, Milngavie Town Hall) with readings, Q&A & signing. Tickets via Eventbrite.👇🏽
Celebrating 100 years of Agnes Owens ✨
Out of the Margins opens 18 April at Lillie Art Gallery. Featuring archival & contemporary works, it honours Owens’ powerful, place-rooted writing and lasting impact, curated by @sorchadallas.bsky.social
PLEASE SHARE ✨
Agnes Owens at 100
‘Out of the Margins’ celebrates her life & work with exhibitions, events & talks across Milngavie & Alexandria this spring. Join us to rediscover a vital Scottish voice. More details soon! Curated by @sorchadallas.bsky.social @agrayarchive.bsky.social
We can’t wait to share our plans with you tomorrow for the upcoming centenary celebrations of the life and work of Agnes Owens ✨
This marks the launch of our first satellite archive @aowensarchive.bsky.social
Stay tuned for details of upcoming events in Milngavie and Alexandria!
We’re taking part in ARA Scotland #Archive30! Day 4 #UntoldStories: The Alasdair Gray Archive champions radical empathy. In 2026, we celebrate Agnes Owens’ centenary and launch @aowensarchive.bsky.social, amplifying her life and work.
Agnes Owens’ fiction is rooted in place—Milngavie, the Vale of Leven, the Highlands. Yet many stories are set nowhere specific. By stripping place to its essentials, Owens transforms local experience into something universal—making private endurance speak to collective conditions.
Alas, Agnes Owens never had a Paris Review interview. However, this one comes pretty close.
journals.openedition.org/etudesecossa...
PLEASE SHARE 🙏
Visit the us & @aowensarchive.bsky.social this April–May 2026. Tours by @sorchadallas.bsky.social (Gray collaborator since 2007). Dates: Apr 24; May 2, 8, 15, 30 at 11am. Book via Eventbrite link in bio.
Celebrating #IWD2026 with the formalisation of @aowensarchive.bsky.social — first satellite of The Alasdair Gray Archive. Reordering 700+ items to centre Owens’ radical, darkly comic voice ahead of her 2026 centenary.
📚 World Book Day |
2026 marks the centenary of Agnes Owens. To celebrate, seven of her novels and short story collections will be reissued by Polygon in May & Sept with new introductions by leading Scottish writers. #WorldBookDay #AgnesOwens
Our email subscribers are enjoying an article by @laurzzs.bsky.social on her work on Agnes Owens. Thank you for supporting us Laura and we can’t wait to visit @aowensarchive.bsky.social
Subscribe today via us4.list-manage.com/contact-form...
#thebletherpgr
#theblether
#agnesowens
Come visit us and @aowensarchive.bsky.social in March 2026!
➡️March 13th, 20th, and 27th at 11am
To secure a space please book here 👇🏽
In The Herald Scotland today: a special focus on Alasdair Gray, with an article by Evie Glen on our Custodian @sorchadallas.bsky.social’s living archive model with a focus on @aowensarchive.bsky.social, our new commission with Rachelle Atalla & how this celebrates & shapes Scotland’s culture.
Owens wrote about “people like that.”
Her stories centre those usually ignored, institutionalised, or condemned—without asking the reader for sympathy.
She said: “The underdog can turn round and bite you just the same as any other dog.”
This is fiction that refuses moral comfort.
With support from Gray, Kelman, and Lochhead, Agnes published Gentlemen of the West in 1984. The book centres on Mac, a young bricklayer navigating masculinity, unemployment, and collapse in post-industrial Scotland.
Drawn from stories told by her son John.
In the mid-1970s, Agnes joined an extra-mural writing group in the Vale of Leven.
Liz Lochhead read her story Arabella and immediately recognised its force—sharing it with Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. All three understood they were encountering a voice that refused compromise.
Agnes Owens wrote between shifts, childcare, & exhaustion. Her serious writing career began later in life - not from lack of ambition, but from structural constraint. Her work challenges the myth that literary greatness requires institutional permission.
Life in the Vale of Leven - After Sam Crosbie’s death, Agnes Owens moved to Alexandria and later married Patrick Owens. She raised seven children, worked multiple jobs, and wrote when she could—her fiction rooted in labour, home, and strained communities.
In 1949, Agnes and her family travelled north searching for work and housing.
They lived in tents and condemned buildings before returning south.
This period later became her autobiographical short story
Marching to the Highlands and Into the Unknown.