Eating Thistles

Like the donkey in the Aesop fable, the US-Scottish writer Deborah Moffatt speaks a language ‘sharp and barbed’. She knows it is ‘better to eat thistles’ than ‘to survive in a nation born of vanity.’ And that those who close borders, soon turn against their own, ‘maddened by power, powered by madness.’

Drawing on Scottish and Irish Gaelic poetry and other literary and folk traditions, Eating Thistles transplants, transforms and re-imagines contemporary and historical events through Aesopian language, slipping between history, myth and memory – Syria, St Kilda, the Sudan, Latin American dictadura and the mass-executions by the SS of Soviet Jews, Roma and prisoners of war. Eating Thistles is a powerful and original study of guilt, denial, innocence and complicity.