Tessa Ransford

Teresa Ransford was born in Mumbai, India on 8 July 1938. Her mother was Lady Torfrida Ransford and her father was Sir Alister Ransford, Master of the Mint of Mumbai.[2] The family moved back to the United Kingdom in 1944,[3] finally moving to Scotland in 1948 when her father took up the position of bursar at the Loretto School in Musselburgh.[2]

Ransford was educated and boarded at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews. She was not happy and turned to books and poetry for consolation.[4] She went on to study German and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.[1]

In 1959, she married Iain Kay Stiven, a minister of the Church of Scotland[1][3] and the pair lived in Pakistan until 1968 with their four children. During the 1970s, Ransford started writing and publishing poems and founded the School of Poets in 1981 as a place for poets to gather on a monthly basis to support one another.[1]

Ransford produced over fifteen volumes of poetry during her lifetime.[5]

The Scottish Poetry Library had 300 books when she started it in 1984. By the time she died, it had over 30,000.[2]

She was awarded the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2000 for services to the Scottish Poetry Library[6] and was President of Scottish PEN from 2003 to 2006.[1]

Ransford was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and died in Edinburgh on 2 September that year.[1]

• Light of the Mind (1980)
• Shadows from the Greater Hill (1987)
• The Nightingale Question (2004)
• Not Just Moonshine: new and selected poems (2008)
• Rug of a Thousand Colours (2012)
• Don’t Mention This to Anyone (2012)
• Made in Edinburgh
• A Good Cause[7]

• Mills, Paul (1982), The Individual Voice, which includes a review of Light of the Mind, in Murray, Glen (ed.), Cencrastus No. 8, Spring 1982, pp. 45 & 46, ISSN 0264-0856

• Tom Hubbard
• Scottish Poetry Library

• The Scottish Poetry Library website