In May 2017 the Icelandic writer Sjón gathered scribes and academics from across the world to Tórshavn in (islanders favour “in” rather than “on”) the Faroe Islands for a conference named “The Tower at the End of the World”. They had one thing in common – they were all islanders, from Cape Verde to Crete and Jamaica to Japan, all creating work preoccupied with places where the only barrier is the sea. This summit took its name from the Faroese writer William Heinesen’s 1976 novel The Tower at the Edge of the World, which, as the conference notes stated, “found in his sea-locked microcosmos of a town a platform for a string of novels and short stories that resonate with people from all around the globe”.
The Scottish writer Malachy Tallack would surely have been at home here, not least because the title and overall theme of Heinesen’s novel (to see William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand”) echoes throughout his debut novel The Valley at the Centre of the World. Having lived in Fair Isle – halfway between Shetland and Orkney, it’s the most remote inhabited island in Britain – and edited the magazine Shetland Life, he understands islands. He has also published a travel-memoir, Sixty Degrees North, in which he followed the 60th parallel line that passes through Shetland, and The Un-Discovered Islands, a lavishly illustrated cataloguing of an archipelago of places that have existed only as myths, phantoms or islands that have simply disappeared.
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