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Tessa Ransford (8 July 1938 – 2 September 2015) was a Scottish poet and the driving force behind the establishment of the Scottish Poetry Library.

Early life
Tessa Ransford was born in Mumbai on 8 July 1938, the daughter of Alister and Torfrida Ransford. Her father was Master of the Mint in Mumbai for 15 years. The family moved back to Britain in 1944, and to Scotland in 1948 when Sir Alister became Bursar of Loretto School in Musselburgh. Tessa was sent to board at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews.

Poetry
Ransford attended the University of Edinburgh, where the German poetry she studied was influential, as was her Professor of German, who was the first person to encourage her in her own writing. She had one poem published in The Student in her final year. She was also greatly influenced by the moral philosophy classes of Professor John MacMurray. She was attracted by the pacifism and social and political engagement of the Quakers, and joined the Society of Friends.

In 1960 Ransford married Kay Stiven, a Church of Scotland minister, and the couple served as missionaries in Pakistan, where Ransford did welfare work with women and children, while having three children of her own. Upon return to Edinburgh in the late 1960s, after her fourth child was born she started going to evening classes in Scottish literature, where the tutor, Bob Tait, introduced her to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. Tait published two of her poems in Scottish International in 1973. Alexander Scott awarded her first prize in the jubilee competition of the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse in 1974, and two small books were published in the mid-1970s under her married name of Tessa Stiven.

The School of Poets
By the early 1980s Ransford’s marriage was breaking down and she was struggling to establish her own identity as a poet. After the publication of her third book, Ransford very much felt the need for a forum where those who had already begun to find their poetic voice could meet for mutual criticism and exchange of ideas. At a rented cottage in Dunsyre, over a weekend in February 1981, she held the first ‘School of Poets’.

A stay in Massachusetts in 1981 showed Ransford a stimulating, liberating environment for writers, women in particular, that seemed lacking in Scotland. The desire to establish such an environment was the driving force behind her determination to set up a centre for poetry in Scotland, her intention being to establish a library which could be both a resource of written works and a hub for reading and writing poetry.

Establishment of the Scottish Poetry Library
Ransford set up a steering committee (including Edwin Morgan, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, Hamish Henderson and Ian Hamilton Finlay) and the Scottish Poetry Library Association was established in November 1982, with the endorsement of many members of the literary world and tireless work by Ransford, including repeated applications to the Scottish Arts Council. In January 1984 the Scottish Poetry Library opened in a former publishers’ packing-room, in Edinburgh’s Tweeddale Court. Ransford guided the Library through its first 15 years, overseeing its move to purpose-built premises in the Canongate before her retirement in 1999. The Scottish Poetry Library has become a centre for poetry, a respected institution and an influential player in contemporary Scottish cultural life. The School of Poets still meets there.

Retirement
Post-retirement, Ransford turned her attention to encouraging the publishing of poetry in pamphlet form, setting up the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award, hosted by the National Library of Scotland, in memory of her second husband, a printer and influential publisher. She initiated Scottish Pamphlet Poetry, which runs a website promoting the work of Scottish poets and small publishers and the sale of their work.

Awards and Honours
Ransford was a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, working between 2001 and 2008 at the Centre for Human Ecology and at Queen Margaret University. She was President of the Scottish Centre of International PEN from 2003 to the end of 2006. Ransford was awarded the OBE for services to the Scottish Poetry Library in 2000, and an honorary Doctorate by the University of Paisley in July 2003.

Personal life
Her 1960 marriage to Kay Stiven, with whom she had four children, was dissolved in the mid-1980s and in 1989 she married the publisher Callum Macdonald. Macdonald died in 1999.

Selected Biography and Criticism

 * ''Nairn, Tom, ‘Profile of Tessa Ransford’, Cencrastus no. 25, Spring 1987
 * ''Somerville-Arjat and Wilson (eds), Sleeping with Monsters: conversations with Scottish and Irish women poets (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990)
 * ''Nicholson, Colin, ‘Patch of cosmic pattern: Tessa Ransford’ in Poem, Purpose and Place: shaping identity in contemporary Scottish verse (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992)
 * ''Conversations with Scottish writers, No.3: Tessa Ransford (Blair Atholl: Fras Publications, 2007)
 * ''John Hudson (ed.), Markings 27, 2008 (Tessa Ransford 70th birthday tribute)