36 Scottish women poets

Lady Grizel Baillie, née Hume, was a Scottish gentlewoman and songwriter. Her accounting ledgers, in which she kept details about her household for more than 50 years, provide information about social life in Scotland in the eighteenth century.

Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions and Fugitive Verses (1840). She shows her interest in moral philosophy and the Gothic. She was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with literary contemporaries such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott. She died at the age of 88.

Anne Bannerman was a Scottish poet. She was part of the Edinburgh literary circle which included John Leyden, Jessie Stewart, and Thomas Campbell, and Dr Robert Anderson. Her work "remains significant for her Gothic ballads, as well as for her innovative sonnet series and her bold original odes."

Lady Anne Barnard was a Scottish travel writer, artist and socialite, and the author of the ballad Auld Robin Gray. Her five-year residence in Cape Town, South Africa, although brief, had a significant impact on the cultural and social life of the time.

Vivienne Margaret 'Meg' Bateman is a Scottish academic, poet and short story writer. She is best known for her works written in Scottish Gaelic; however, she has also published work in the English language.

Mary Beaton (1543–1598) was a Scottish noblewoman and an attendant of Mary, Queen of Scots. She and three other ladies-in-waiting were collectively known as "The Four Marys".

Sheena Blackhall is a Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, illustrator, traditional story teller and singer. Author of over 150 poetry pamphlets, 15 short story collections, 4 novels and 2 televised plays for children, The Nicht Bus and The Broken Hert. Along with Les Wheeler, she co-edits the Doric resource Elphinstone Kist, and has worked on the Aberdeen Reading Bus, as a storyteller and writer, also sitting on the editorial board for their children's publications in Doric, promoting Scots culture and language in the North East. In 2018 Aberdeen University awarded her the degree of Bachelor of the University.

Christine De Luca is a Scottish poet and writer from Shetland, who writes in both English and Shetland dialect Her poetry has been translated into many languages. She was appointed Edinburgh's Makar, or poet laureate from 2014 to 2017. De Luca is a global advocate for the Shetland dialect and literature of the Northern Isles of Scotland.

Marjorie Fleming was a Scottish child writer and poet. She gained appreciation from Robert Louis Stevenson, Leslie Stephen, and possibly Walter Scott.

Olive Fraser was a Scottish poet born in Aberdeen. Both her parents emigrated to Australia within a year of her birth, leaving Olive living with her great aunt in Nairn. She won the Calder Prize for English verse while studying English at the University of Aberdeen, and the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse at University of Cambridge in 1935, but did not complete her studies at Cambridge for health reasons.

Anne Frater is a Scottish poet. She was born in Stornoway (Steòrnabhagh), in Lewis in the Outer Hebrides or Western Isles. She was brought up in the village of Upper Bayble in the district of Point, a small community which has also been home to Derick Thomson and Iain Crichton Smith.

Catherine Grace Godwin was a Scottish novelist, amateur painter and poet.

Anne Grant often styled Mrs Anne Grant of Laggan was a Scottish poet and author best known for her collection of mostly biographical poems Memoirs of an American Lady as well as her earlier work Letters from the Mountains.

Elizabeth Hamilton was a Scottish essayist, poet, satirist and novelist.

Janet Hamilton was a nineteenth-century Scottish poet.

Morag Henriksen describes herself as a Highlander born and bred. Growing up in Lochcarron, where her father was the headmaster of the local school, she developed a life long love of Gaidhlig culture, folk music, singing, story telling and poetry and this informed her later work as a writer.

Anne Hunter (1742–1821) was a saloniere and poet in Georgian London. She is mostly remembered now for writing the texts to at least nine of Joseph Haydn's 14 songs in English. She entertained the leading Bluestockings at their house.

Beatrice Irwin was an actress, poet, designer and promoter of the Baháʼí Faith. Born Alice Beatrice Simpson, she took Beatrice Irwin as her stage name and later adopted it as her real name.

Violet Jacob was a Scottish writer known especially for her historical novel Flemington and for her poetry, mainly in Scots. She was described by a fellow Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid as "the most considerable of contemporary vernacular poets".

Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won a number of awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.

Jessie Kerr Lawson, May 19, 1838 – July 30, 1917 was a Scottish-Canadian writer and poet.

Charlotte Lennox, née Ramsay, was a Scottish novelist, playwright and poet, mostly remembered today as the author of The Female Quixote, and for her association with Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Richardson. However, she had a long career in her own right.

Kirsty Logan is a Scottish novelist, poet, performer, literary editor, writing mentor, book reviewer, and writer of short fiction.

Alice MacDonell was a Scottish poetess who claimed to be Chieftainess of the MacDonell clan of Keppoch, and was recognised as bardess to that clan.

Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (c.1578–c.1640) was a Scottish poet.

Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical fiction, science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. She was appointed CBE in 1981. The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.

Isabel Pagan, also known as "Tibbie", was a Scottish poet of the Romantic Era.

Catherine Eliza Richardson was a Scottish author and poet who published a four-volume novel and three collections of verse.

Maria Banks Riddell was a West Indies-born poet, naturalist, editor and travel writer, who was resident in Scotland and Wales. Robert Burns paid tribute to her as "a votary of the Muses".

Elizabeth Jane Ross was a Scottish poet, artist, and collector of Gaelic music.

Anna "Nan" Shepherd was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional Northern Scottish communities in North Scotland. This landscape and weather played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a British novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.

Helen D'Arcy Stewart was Scottish poet and a noted Edinburgh society hostess of the late 18th and early 19th century, as wife to Dugald Stewart, an influential Scottish philosopher and mathematician best known for popularizing the Scottish Enlightenment.

Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She first worked as a writer and poet, later turning the visual arts. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black peoples in Europe.

Rachel Annand Taylor was a Scottish poet, prominent in the Celtic Revival, and later a biographer and literary critic.

Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw (1677–1727) was a Scottish poet and the reputed author of the ballad Hardyknute.