Margaret Tait, filmmaker and poet, was born in Orkney in 1918. She trained first as a medical doctor before studying film in Rome in the 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999. Personae is Tait’s previously unpublished non-fiction manuscript edited by Sarah Neely with a selection of photographs from Margaret Tait’s personal archive with a foreword by Ali Smith and beautifully designed by Maeve Redmond.