Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up on his family’s farm near Kilbarchan. His first collection Bovine Pastoral was published in 2004 and was runner up in the Calum MacDonald Memorial Award. Since then he has brought out a further five collections and an illustrated fable. In 2009 he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and was the winner of the James McCash poetry competition. In 2010 he was chosen as one of the poets showcased in Oxford Poets 2010.

In 2014 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow.

He is a powerful reader of his own work.

He is one of the founders and current chair of St Mungo’s Mirrorbal,l the Glasgow network of poets and poetry lovers and is a committee member StAnza Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.

“Carruth is an unusual Scottish voice and, consequently a very distinctive one, a direct and clear poetic voice that is able without compromising his huge technical ability, to reach out and engage those who rarely, if ever read poetry”
The Herald

“His poems give voice with subtlety and compassion to the silent decline of dairy farming”
The Scotsman

“Jim Carruth is Scotland’s leading rural poet, an activist and farmer whose poems are moving testaments to a fragile way of life.”
Glastonbury Festival

In 2017 he was inducted into the Poetry Archive: https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/jim-carruth