Dàn nam Ban 

by Ceitidh Chambeuil

Dàn nam Ban / Fate of Women is the debut collection from award winning bilingual Gaelic English poet, singer and teacher Ceitidh Chaimbeul.

The collection is rooted in Ceitidh’s heritage from the Isle of Raasay and Midlothian and plaits the stories of women of folklore, local history, family and her own experience as a mother. Dàn nam Ban shows how the ripples of the past lap on the shores of the present. It tackles hard hitting subjects of Altzheimers’, child death and moves seamlessly into bedtime stories, love and sex.

This book provides a voice to women’s stories across generations, highlighting both historical and contemporary issues. The primary themes include folklore, family history, motherhood, and the impact of the past on the present. The focus is on women’s experiences, both personal and communal, and how these narratives shape our understanding of identity and heritage.

Dàn nam Ban by Ceitidh Chaimbeul is a much anticipated first collection from a writer who was the Scottish Poetry Library’s first Gaelic ambassador.

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Dàn nam Ban is a multi-voiced exploration of womanhood, heritage and the emotional landscapes that shape us. The book that weaves the ancient with the contemporary: folklore beside memory, trauma beside tenderness, political history beside personal rebirth.

The poems move between Gaelic and English, not simply as translation, but as dual ways of seeing—two lenses that reveal how identity survives, fractures, and ultimately reasserts itself.

At its heart, the collection is a celebration of women’s stories that have too often been silenced: ancestors whose names echo through land, legend, and lineage; mothers burdened with love and guilt; daughters inheriting both language and loss. The book’s emotional depth lies in its ability to hold beauty and brutality side by side—war and domestic rituals, queer love and familial duty, sea-spray grief and folklore-fuelled imagination.
The collections aims to reclaim narrative space for women, to honour the cultural and linguistic continuities and to show how personal experience is inseparable from history, landscape, and the survival of our storiES.