{"id":21932,"date":"2025-03-05T12:09:32","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T12:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/?p=21932"},"modified":"2025-03-07T12:31:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T12:31:51","slug":"hands-up-for-trads-women-in-music-and-culture-2025-morna-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/hands-up-for-trads-women-in-music-and-culture-2025-morna-young\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands Up for Trad’s Women in Music and Culture 2025: Morna Young"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hands Up for Trad\u2019s Women in Music and Culture 2025 list has been announced to celebrate just some of the women working in Scotland.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Launched as part of International Women\u2019s Day 2025<\/a>, we shine the spotlight on 12 women who all contribute towards Scotland\u2019s cultural landscape through their work. Read the 2025 list here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We asked Morna Young<\/strong> to tell us more about her work, influences and ambitions for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you first get involved in the arts and who were your early influences?<\/strong>
I was the kid who kept a diary, scribbling every thought. My dad was lost at sea when I was young, so I think pen on paper helped me somehow process or maybe understand that loss. I also loved the escapism of storytelling, and I remember reading fairy-tales and then rewriting the endings, or retelling them from a different point of view. I think that\u2019s why I loved adapting The Snow Queen for the Lyceum so much, because it reminded me of my childhood scribbles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My journey into playwriting was via journalism and then performing, but I reached my destination eventually. When I was in school, I didn\u2019t know that playwriting could be a career and I was often torn between my working-class instinct to take a \u2018safe\u2019 job versus chasing my dream of writing professionally. Rona Munro and Liz Lochhead were both influences, partly because I read \u2018Bold Girls\u2019 and \u2018Mary Queen of Scots Got her Head Chopped Off\u2019 when I was a teenager, and they were very visible female voices. I have since worked with both Rona and Liz, and I often think of how proud \/ disbelieving my younger self would be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a time when many artists and creative professionals are facing significant challenges, how have you developed and evolved your creative practice over the past few years?<\/strong>
The funding situation in Scotland has been so precarious, and artists are exhausted. Whilst the recent Multi Year Funding announcements seem positive, I am curious how long it will take for that funding to reach the artists who desperately need support after such a challenging period. I remain particularly worried about a loss of working-class voices as the industry becomes increasingly unsustainable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In saying that, I feel privileged to have kept working these past few years amidst such a brutal climate. I\u2019m only now really starting to process that I staged three back to back main stage shows; The Stamping Ground (the Runrig musical, with Raw Material \/ Eden Court), The Snow Queen (Lyceum) and Sunset Song (Dundee Rep \/ Lyceum). That would be a quite an unbelievable achievement for anyone, but it feels even more pertinent as a working-class woman. I guess I had my head down working for so long that I didn\u2019t ever pause long enough to go \u201cwow, okay, that\u2019s pretty massive\u201d. I\u2019ve spoken a lot about visibility over the years, and I always hope that such milestones help the next generation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developmentally, I\u2019m always most attracted to writing the stories that terrify me; the ones I can\u2019t make sense of, or have no idea how they\u2019d work on stage. Whilst I definitely return to some themes time and time again, I\u2019ve always sought to push myself further, to experiment and to keep honing my craft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who or what interests you creatively?<\/strong>
Working-class women have always been my main inspiration. I remember reading that women are usually relegated to \u2018side-kick\u2019 status in working-class stories, which tend to focus on industry, and I felt a really inspirational gut punch when I took that in. My lens on the world is that of a working-class woman, so that ultimately influences everything that I write. Loss and absence tend to crop up as common themes in my work, alongside repeated explorations of place, landscape and language. I also have an endless personal interest in folklore, mythology and fairy-tales, especially stories that exist in collective community memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also love working with music, and continue to find myself playing with how I interweave music and text. Music has always been a huge influence on my work; I was selected for violin lessons when I was in Primary School (one of the now sadly missed schemes), and I\u2019ve been part of the folk music scene my entire life. I really love that I\u2019ve increasingly worked in musicals over the past few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are your plans for the next year or so and\/or what are your longer term creative ambitions?<\/strong>
I\u2019ve just returned home from the Johnny Mercers Writers Grove at Goodspeed in the US, where I\u2019ve been developing a new musical with composer Finn Anderson. I\u2019m really excited about that project and working on it further. I\u2019m also currently writing a new play for the Traverse as part of the Peggy Ramsay \/ Film Four award, in addition to a new play for children, and I\u2019m continuing to write for BBC Scotland\u2019s River City. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m really happy to be working across stage and screen at the moment, and to be balancing plays of different scales. My big creative aim for this year is to carve out more free writing time away from deadlines, so I can deep think about the ideas I want to work on in the coming years. I\u2019m keen to keep developing musicals, but I\u2019m also really interested in Scots Language adaptations, and I have a feature film brewing that I want some time to think about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My secret ambition is always to write a novel\u2026 maybe one day!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find out more about Morna Young here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the Hands Up for Trad\u2019s Women in Music and Culture 2024 List<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hands Up for Trad are an organisation who work with Scottish traditional music, language and culture. If you would like to support our work you can donate here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hands Up for Trad\u2019s Women in Music and Culture 2025 list has been announced to celebrate just some of the women working in Scotland.   Launched as part of International Women\u2019s Day 2025, we shine the spotlight on 12 women who all contribute towards Scotland\u2019s cultural landscape through their work. Read the 2025 list here. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,336],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-news","7":"category-women-in-music","8":"entry","9":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"simon","author_link":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/author\/simon\/"},"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcv15g-5HK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21932"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22059,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21932\/revisions\/22059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}