About us - Top Left Corner

Top Left Corner is a small non-profit organisation registered as a Community Interest Company. We seek to benefit the local community of Assynt, in the northwest Highlands of Scotland, and a wider global community of writers and other artists. Any surplus profit that we make is shared between Assynt Foundation and Scottish International PEN.

Our mission is to encourage people from near and far to come together in Assynt to create written and other artworks by connecting with the landscape and community. Our core values include respect for, empathy with and connectedness with individuals, community and landscape. We seek to nurture, encourage and make space for creative potential and to celebrate creativity, in ways that are environmentally sensitive, open, transparent and accountable.

We organise Creative Retreat Weeks, an annual competition, arts and crafts workshops,  activities and celebratory events and we are curating a gallery of creative work inspired by the landscape and people of the Top Left Corner.

Our Directors

Mandy Haggith lives in Assynt, on a wooded coastal croft. She has published two collections of poetry, a non-fiction book about paper and her first novel, The Last Bear, won the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for the best environmental writing in Scotland.

A recent Scotsman review described her as a 'backwoods philosopher' and she is a long-standing campaigner for the world's forests and the people dependent on them. She is currently writing about the history of people in Assynt, thanks to a Scottish Arts Council award.

View Mandy's page >
 

John Bolland is a prize-winning short story author who writes novels, short fiction and poetry in Scots and English. Raised near Glasgow, he has been based in rural Aberdeenshire in the north-east of Scotland since 1989. For most of his adult life, he has supported his family and his writing working in the offshore oil industry.

He graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s M.Litt. Creative Writing course in 2005. In 2007, John was runner-up in the RSL V.S. Pritchett Short Story Award and took 2nd prize in the Fish International Short Story Compettion in 2008.

Other short stories and novel excerpts have appeared in publications including Pulp.net, Pushing Out the Boat, The London Magazine and Lallans.

View John's page >

Helen Lockhart, Helen Steven and Clive Sheppard have recently become directors and their biographies will be included here shortly.