Beyond the Forbidden Gate | Publications

Produced and designed in collaboration with Andrew Brash, Beyond the Forbidden Gate presented a suite of three publications that tell previously unpublished and newly commissioned working-class histories, stories, and scripts that centre on North Glasgow;

For Beyond the Forbidden Gate, we are pleased to share A History of Possilpark with a wider audience.  A History of Possilpark is a previously unpublished work originally written by Willy in 1993 and discovered by Joey in the local history box at Possilpark Library in the course of researching this project.

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Willy Maley is a Glasgow academic and writer. He is currently Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he has worked since 1994. 

His research interests span national and colonial identities in 16th and 17th century literature through to the modern African novel. He is currently working on a research project on John Milton and Empire entitled Mapping Milton, and on a collaborative project with David Baker and Pat Palmer on early modern Irish networks and collective biography called MACMORRIS. 

For Beyond the Forbidden Gate Joey and Anni have collaborated on bringing together The Spy Who Went Back to Bricklaying —  a new publication which brings together writing by Ned Donaldson and  excerpts from a previously unpublished interview between Ned and writer, activist, and 1994 Booker Prize winner James Kelman.

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Dr. Anni Donaldson is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde and a feminist oral historian, researcher and critic. Her father, Ned Donaldson, was a leading Communist Party, trade union organiser and independent historian and activist from Possilpark, Glasgow. Anni recently republished Ned Donaldson and Les Forster’s Sell and Be Damned: the Merrylee Housing Scandal with the Scottish Labour History Society, an account of the mass struggle to prevent the sell off of council housing in Glasgow in 1951.

 Fever: Writing the Highs and Lows of Recovery— a new collection of writing that brings together the script for Fever with prose and poetry written by members of SISCO’s creative writing group facilitated by Joey over the course of his In-Residence project. Developed through a series of prompts and writing exercises drawing from the legacy of The Special Unit at HMP Barlinnie, alternative histories of the city, and the role of community and solidarity, these new works respond to and expand upon the central themes put forward in Fever.