James McGonigal taught English for fourteen years in secondary schools before working in colleges and faculties of education, currently in the University of Glasgow. He combines teaching and creative writing with publications and research in special educational needs, Scottish and Irish literature, and literary modernism, and is editor of the SCROLL series (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) published by Dutch-American publishers, Rodopi. He has published poetry and prose for adults and children (in both English and Scots language), and co-edited several anthologies of contemporary writing in the New Writing Scotland series in the 1990s. His poetry and translations have been quite widely published in literary magazines and some are collected in Driven Home (Mariscat, 1998) and in the tri-lingual long poem in English, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Passage/An Pasaiste, (Mariscat, 2004). As a writer, he has worked with school and community groups. His poetry has won literary prizes in Scotland and Ireland, and a bursary in 2002 from the Scottish Arts Council. McGonigal's biography of Edwin Morgan, Beyond the Last Dragon, was published by Sandstone in 2010, and won the 2011 Saltire Scottish Research Book of the Year.