Barry Didcock

Sinéad Gleeson is a prize-winning Irish author whose 2019 essay collection Constellations: Reflections From Life won an Irish Book Award and was later shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of Scotland’s top literary awards. In 2022 she collaborated with Kim Gordon, guitarist with cult America band Sonic Youth, to co-edit This Woman’s Work, a book of essay on music written by women. This month sees the publication of her debut novel, Hagstone, set among a community of women on a rugged island which is home to reclusive artist Nell. What’s the last book you read?

Catherine Prasifka says: “If you’d asked me, when I was a teenager, what I felt about social media, I would have said: ‘There’s a capacity for harm but also a capacity for good’. But I think the direction everything is going in is diminishing the capacity for good, and making capacity for harm so much greater.”

A new museum dedicated to the life, work, legacy and quirky vision of one of Scotland’s best-loved artists opens next weekend overlooking his beloved Clyde estuary and close to where he spent much of his working life.

The madness, as Graeme Armstrong refers to it, was the life he led as a boy embedded in gang culture and its attendant dangers: violence, drink, drugs, criminality.

Pat Collins is an Irish film-maker from West Cork who has made over 30 films, many of them documentaries. To date he is best known for Song Of Granite, a film portrait of Irish traditional singer Joe Heaney. His latest work is That They May Face The Rising Sun, an adpatation of the 2002 book of the same name by the great Irish novelist John McGahern. Released in UK cinemas on April 26 it captures a year in the life of a lakeside community in the 1980s and stars Barry Ward and Anna Bederke as a couple returning to Ireland after having lived in London. Meanwhile on May 4 Edinburgh’s Folk Film Gathering will host the Scottish premiere of Collins’s 2024 film Songlines, a documentary portrait of the singers within the Irish traveller community.

Beth Bate is director of Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), the cinema, art gallery and print studio located in Dundee’s so-called Cultural Quarter. Voted one of Scotland’s top 10 buildings of the 20th century by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, DCA has just celebrated its 25th anniversary.

Amy Winehouse has been given the big screen treatment in a new film released this week and directed by a filmmaker with previous experience of turning the lives of iconic musicians into biopics.

One of the world’s most famous paintings, by one of the world’s most famous artists, is coming to Edinburgh next month as part of an ambitious project of loans to celebrate the anniversary of London’s National Gallery.

This podcast by Scottish journalist and film-maker Anthony Baxter follows on from You’ve Been Trumped, his award-winning 2011 David and Goliath documentary about the local people protesting the building of Donald Trump’s luxury hotel and golf course at Balmedie in Aberdeenshire. Baxter has made two more films on the subject, and in this podcast he brings it all together alongside new interviews. A great chance to be outraged all over again.

On BBC Radio 4 last Monday morning, while plugging the Today programme’s associated podcast, presenter Nick Robinson said: “I had a letter recently from someone who didn’t even know what a podcast was.” There was amusement in his voice, but though a glance at the calendar revealed the date to be April 1, this was no joke.