Sandstone Press Managing Editor Robert Davidson announced today (21 April 2006) that Kenneth White is to direct the Company's forthcoming 'The Highliner Series'.

The Highliner Series will follow and prolong the high line of Scottish and world culture as viewed by Scottish poet and intellectual Kenneth White. Consisting mainly of relatively short books, situated at the far limits of culture, the series will aim at the opening up of a new space, critical and creative, in writing and thought.

Kenneth White is one of the most daring of Europe's writers, thinkers and teachers. Breaking out of the bounds of a limiting culture he left for France in 1967. There he held first the Chair of 20th Century Poetics at the Sorbonne, later founding the International Institute of Geopoetics which now has centres in various countries, including Scotland and England. In 2005 he became the first Hi-Arts International Arts Fellow, presenting a series of three lectures in Wester Ross, Inverness and Orkney. As ever his words were pregnant with intimations of what is possible.

Robert Davidson says, 'I met with Kenneth White during his tenure as the first Hi-Arts International Fellow and between us we struck up an immediate rapport. His work in Geopoetics fits in very well with the Sandstone ethos and offers new directions and opportunities. The first book (see below) will be published in May with the second appearing, we expect, within this calendar year. Kenneth will select material as he thinks appropriate and work with me, as Series Editor, to finalise the texts'.

Appearing in May the first book, titled On the Atlantic Edge, will be the full text of his Highland lectures introduced by his Edinburgh International Book Festival Lecture of 2005 on 'World Writing'. The second book in the series will be The Radical Field by Tony McManus. Others will follow in 2007, Scotland's Year of Highland Culture.

The series will be finely designed and produced and each book will carry a cover image from Highland based artist Wendy Sutherland. Wendy's work is increasingly appreciated wherever it travels, increasingly challenging attitudes to the land as it is seen.