Merryn Glover in conversation about her newest work, The Hidden Fires, with University of Aberdeen Regius Professor of English and Scottish Literature Alison Lumsden. In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes the challenge of walking in the Cairngorms, with Nan Shepherd as companion and guiding light. Following in the footsteps and contours of The Living Mountain, she explores the same landscapes and themes as Shepherd’s seminal work. This is a journey separated by time but unified by space and purpose, a conversation between two women across nearly a century that explores how entering the life of a mountain can illuminate our own. Merryn Glover is the award-winning writer of fiction, drama, poetry and journalism. In a life spent crossing cultures, she was brought up in South Asia, went to University in Australia and has called Scotland home for nearly 30 years. Her plays and short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland and widely anthologised. Her first novel, A House Called Askival is set in an Indian hill-station, where she went to school, and her second, Of Stone and Sky, in the Badenoch region of the Cairngorms National Park where she now lives. It won Book of the Year at the Bookmark Book Festival, Blairgowrie, and was long-listed for the Highland Book Prize. In 2019, Merryn was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is a regular contributor to The Guardian Country Diary.