Name: Callum MacKillop
Years at The Hall: 2008 – 2015
House: Purple House
Current Career: Poet, Editor, Gap Year Student at The Hall
Over a decade ago, the familiar susurrus of the library, the hum of the DT room, the bright, tentative pluck of first instruments and the rising cadence of debate sparring in the corridors served as a sanctuary of sorts for Callum Mackillop, who was, even then, instinctively drawn to the worlds that words could open – a pull that would deepen over time.
His bright, enquiring energy has since carried him from classroom beanbags to the archives of The Times Literary Supplement. Despite bouts of mischievous during his prep years–a rite spared by no boy in his young age–there was one constant that held fast: his fascination with stories, and the intricate mechanics of how words work.
The Making of a Writer
Such curiosity has gathered its own momentum. After graduating from St Andrews in 2024, Mackillop has gone on to publish essays in The London Magazine and intern with the Times Literary Supplement where he combed through more than a century of archival poems by writers like Sylvia Plath, Auden, and R.S. Thomas. In late 2025, he founded Slow Burn, a bi-annual poetry pamphlet supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, now stocked by the London Review Bookshop and collected by the National Poetry Library – a rare distinction for an emerging writer.
“In the years since I graduated, I realised I had a few poems which I was ready to do something with and I thought that I had a rare window of time and quite a unique opportunity to make something,” MacKillop remarks.
Returning to the Stanza
Now he has returned to The Hall as a gap-year support teacher in the Senior School – writing in the early mornings, reading submissions in the rare quiet moments, and inspiring boys in the very classrooms that once shaped him.
“It’s very easy to connect with these boys and their lives – there’s something very tender about being back here,” he says. “There are some great little groups – quirky boys with a good vibe going – and I love seeing them look out for each other.”
Library sessions with Mr Gilbey McKenzie have stood the test of Mackillop’s memory. He recalls the heat of the playground still on their faces, boys sinking into bean bags as this “stern old man softened into these stories” – a storyteller whose voice could shift the entire atmosphere of the room. It was, as Mackillop puts it, the moment he first realised how a story could “sweep you up” and carry you somewhere entirely different.
Learning his Form
At university, he roamed widely across English, art history, film and classics, yet poetry proved the constant to which he returned. Working with Don Paterson – the Scottish poet and musician whose accolades include two T.S. Eliot Prizes – he began to understand writing as both craft and sensation: a process in which form, feeling, and precision converge.
Slow Burn, the poetry pamphlet he founded after graduating, grew from finding meaning and poems in those short, rich, rhythmic feelings that burn slowly. Its success was surprising to Mackillop as it began as a personal project but has since amassed into “something small but meaningful.”
The Turn
When asked what he would tell current pupils, Mackillop doesn’t hesitate: read widely, take the stage when it’s offered, make things even when you’re not sure how they’ll turn out. Perform, present, try, experiment – because it is this habit of trying it out that leads to craft. If you have an idea for something, he says, just begin. Gather a few friends, find a space, and start. It is the same principle that penned his journey from indefatigable schoolboy to published poet – the courage to begin.
Looking ahead, Mackillop hopes to continue writing while pursuing further study; he has applications in for master’s programmes in modern and contemporary literature and intends to keep expanding Slow Burn as both a publication and a home for new voices. The second edition of Slow Burn is out now.