MacGillivray is the Highland name of writer and artist Kirsten Norrie. Brought up internationally and living for a significant period of time in both England and Northern Ireland, Norrie returned to Scotland after studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford where she received a doctorate in Performance and Scottish Identity; her thesis was entitled Cloth, Cull and Cocktail: Anatomising the Performer Body of 'Scotland'.
She has published four books of poetry, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog/Red Hen, 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books, 2016), The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) and Ravage, An Astonishment of Fire (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). A satellite work to Ravage was published by Broken Sleep Books in May 2024 in the form of the pamphlet The Demon Tracts, a reproduction of the loggbok of Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet, Kristján Norge, with an introduction by MacGillivray. Forthcoming publications from Broken Sleep Books include the novel An American Book of the Dead: A Wild West Séance (as by Kirsten Norrie), autumn 2024; and a non-fiction work, Scottish Lost Boys (as by Kirsten Norrie), spring 2025. Unbound will publish her second non-fiction work Eagle Song: A Spirit Road Trip (as by Kirsten Norrie) in 2026.
Her writing has appeared in Magma, ASLS New Writing Scotland, The Scotsman, Test Centre Magazine, Be the First to Like This (a new generation of Scottish voices by the Scottish Poetry Library), Art Monthly, Performance Research, By Our Selves (a book accompanying the film alongside essays by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore), Strange Attractor and Gutter Magazine. She has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cheltenham and Gloucester, the Royal College of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. She is the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow, Cambridge University, 2024-5. After living for many years in Edinburgh, she is now based in Oxfordshire.
Her music has appeared on the BBC, for film soundtracks The Whalebone Box, Swandown Channel 4/Britdoc, 2012 and By Our Selves, 2015 by British director Andrew Kötting in which she appeared in a cameo opposite Toby Jones. She has performed internationally with The Fall, Arlo Guthrie, Arthur Brown, Shirley Collins, Michael Moorcock, Vic Godard, Toby Jones, Alan Moore, Jem Finer (The Pogues), Current 93, Gallon Drunk, Iain Sinclair, Trembling Bells, The Incredible String Band, Thurston Moore, and Band of Susans. In 2017 she recorded Sitting Bull's great grandson reading from The Last Wolf of Scotland. She was nominated as a PRS/Help Musicians Scottish Performer of the Year in 2017 and received a Paul Hamlyn Composer Award in 2020.
