Bill Findlay (writer)

Bill Findlay (11 June 1947 – 15 May 2005) was a Scottish writer and theatre academic. As a translator, editor, critic and advocate, he made an important contribution to Scottish theatre. He worked as a lecturer in the School of Drama at Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University and was a founder editor and regular contributor to the Scottish and international literature, arts and affairs magazine, Cencrastus.

Born in Culross in Fife, Findlay attended Dunfermline High School and left home in 1965 to work as a civil servant in London. He returned to Scotland in 1970 to attend Newbattle Abbey College, spending two years there before going on to Stirling University, where he graduated with a first class honours degree in English in 1976. His career in writing began when he won the McCash prize for poetry.

For the first issue of  Cencrastus, in 1979, Findlay interviewed Margaret Atwood on the relationship of Canadian writers and writing to the 'Imperial Cultures' of America and Britain.

Drama


In 1980, Findlay and Martin Bowman translated Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Sœurs into contemporary Scots as The Guid Sisters. Michael Boyd produced their adaptation for Glasgow's Tron Theatre in 1989 and it went on to play in Toronto in 1990 and at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal in 1992 as part of the British contribution to the city's 350th anniversary celebrations. It was revived by the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2012. In his review of the play, Andrew Latimer wrote "When Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay first translated Tremblay's text into fierce Glasgow-Scots, with all the care and political attentiveness required to succeed, something vibrant, globally resonant and deeply sociological was unlocked. While still situated in the realm of francophone Canada, the language couldn't be closer to our own doorstep."

In the years following the première of The Guid Sisters, Bowman and Findlay translated seven other Tremblay plays into Scots: Hosanna, The Real Wurld? (Tron, 1991); The House Among the Stars (Traverse Theatre and Perth Theatre, 1992); Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (LadderMan Productions for the Tron, 1994); Albertine in Five Times (Clyde Unity, 1998); Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer (Traverse Theatre and the Barbican, 2000); and If Only... (Royal Lyceum Theatre, 2003). The Tron Theatre took The Real Wurld? to the Stony Brook International Theatre Festival on Long Island, New York in 1991. John Corbett has described this body of work as making an 'honorable addition' to a long tradition of translating literature in a variety of languages into Scots. Jennifer Harvie has explored the cultural and political ramifications of the intercultural exchange represented by the translation of Tremblay's work in joual into Scots.

Findlay and Bowman translated other works by Quebecois playwrights including Jeanne-Mance Delisle's The Reel of the Hanged Man (Stellar Quines, 2000). In November 2005, Michel-Marc Bouchard's The Skelfs was given a rehearsed reading at the Traverse Theatre as a memorial tribute to Findlay. On his own, Findlay undertook a number of Scots translations and adaptations, including Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers (Dundee Rep, 1997), Pavel Kohout's Fire in the Basement (Communicado, 1998), Teresa Lubkiewicz's Werewolves (Theatre Archipelago, 1999) and Raymond Cousse's Bairn's Brothers (Mull Little Theatre, 2000),.

Findlay was awarded a PhD in 2000 and held a readership in the School of Drama and Creative Industries at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. He edited and contributed the first chapter to A History of Scottish Theatre (1998). He also edited Scots Plays of the Seventies (2001), Frae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translations into Scots (2004), and (with John Corbett) Serving Twa Maisters: An Anthology of Scots Translations of Classic Plays (2005).

After his death in 2005, Queen Margaret University School of Drama established a Bill Findlay Fellowship in Stage Translation in his memory.