Christopher Whyte (writer)

Christopher Whyte (Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin) is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic. He is a novelist in English, a poet in Scottish Gaelic, the translator into English of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Maria Rilke, and an innovative and controversial critic of Scottish and international literature. His work in Gaelic also appears under the name Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin.

Whyte first published some translations of modern poetry into Gaelic, including poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini (first publication, 1980), Konstantinos Kavafis, Yannis Ritsos and Anna Akhmatova. He then published two collections of original poetry in Gaelic, Uirsgeul (Myth), 1991 and An Tràth Duilich (The Difficult Time), 2002. In the meantime he started to write prose in English and has published four novels, Euphemia MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin (1995), The Warlock of Strathearn (1997), The Gay Decameron (1998) and The Cloud Machinery (2000).

In 2002, Whyte won a Scottish Research Book of the Year award for his edition of Sorley Maclean's Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir), published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. He has also compiled some anthologies of present-day Gaelic poetry and written critical articles and essays.

Whyte was born in Glasgow (Scotland) in October 1952, educated there by Jesuits at St Aloysius College, and took the English studies tripos at Pembroke College, Cambridge between 1970 and 1973. He spent most of the next 12 years in Italy, teaching under Agostino Lombardo in the Department of English and American Studies at Rome's La Sapienza university from 1977 to 1985.

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