Career
His latest novel, "The Brilliant & Forever", is published by Polygon in March 2016. MacNeil"s previous novels, A Method Actor"s Guide to Jekyll and Hyde (Polygon, 2011) and best-selling debut, The Stornoway Way (Hamish Hamilton, 2005), were both published to widespread critical acclaim. He is also the author of Be Wise Be Otherwise (Canongate) and the plays Sweetness, an adaptation of a novel by Swedish author Torgny Lindgren, and The Callanish Stoned (Theatre Hebrides), and his short stories have been published extensively.
MacNeil"s anthology of poetry from the Scottish islands, These Islands, We Sing, was published by Polygon in June 2011.
He often collaborates with visual artists and musicians. The album Kevin MacNeil and Willie Campbell Are Visible From Space (An Lanntair) was released to acclaim in 2011.
A single taken from the album, Local Manitoba Ruins Everything (Fantastic Plastic) was formerly Single of the Week in The Guardian, in The List and on Steve Lamacq"s British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 6 show. MacNeil was the inaugural Iain Crichton Smith Bilingual Writing Fellow and has held further prestigious writing residencies in Sweden (Uppsala University), Bavaria (Villa Concordia) and a number of other places, including lecturing on the Creative Writing Master of Science at Edinburgh University.
He has recently become an honorary writer in residence at Kingston University.
MacNeil is also a keen cyclist, and in September 2009 cycled 1300 km of the Danube, from source to Budapest, on a fixed-gear track bike, for two cancer charities. The British Broadcasting Corporation filmed a documentary about him and his bike ride which took just a dozen cycling days.
