BBC Sequamur play explainer

Details: Created: 26 August 2026

Cover of the English Higher text book on Sequamur in Scottish secondary schools. — Sequamur, recommended content for Higher and Nat 5 courses in English and Gaelic.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to see Donald S Murray’s play, Sequamur, the BBC has produced a bite size summary to catch you up.

Aimed at Higher English pupils in Scottish secondary schools, the resource is open to all and an excellent précis of the 2015 play set in Stornoway in the aftermath of World War One.

Over the past decade or so, the play has earned significant plaudits and recognition.

It has been performed widely across Scotland, including at the Edinburgh Festival, and internationally in Belfast, London, and Ypres.

Sequamur was praised as “moving, powerful, with a message that resonates today” and has been distributed to over 100 Scottish secondary schools as part of the English and Gaelic Higher curriculum.

Partly in recognition of the play’s impact, Donald was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Association for Scottish Literature in 2025.

If the BBC whets your appetite, there is also the full text of the play in the 2021 drama anthology Dràma na Gàidhlig: Ceud Bliadhna air an Àrd-ùrlar: A Century of Gaelic Drama, edited by Michelle MacLeod.

See the BBC explainer

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Donald S. Murray was raised in the Ness district of the Isle of Lewis. He spent his teenage years at The Nicolson Institute secondary school in Stornoway - in those days, pupils from rural districts stayed in school hostels in the town rather than returning home each night – before studying at the University of Glasgow in the 1980s. After receiving an MA (Joint Hons) in English and Scottish Literature, he went on to gain a Diploma in Education and a Secondary Teaching Qualification.

Since then, Donald has written an ever-growing range of books and published a wide variety of essays, columns, short stories, and poems in the likes of The Herald, The Guardian, and The Island Review. His writing, both of fiction and non-fiction, has received widespread critical acclaim and appeared on shortlists and longlists for numerous literary awards.

His debut novel, As the Women Lay Dreaming, won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the The Herald Scottish Culture Awards Outstanding Literature Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award in 2019.

In 2015, Sequamur, Donald’s first full-length Gaelic play, was performed throughout Scotland, including at the Edinburgh Festival, as well as in Belfast, London, and Ypres in Belgium. Described as 'moving, powerful, with a message that resonates today,' it examined the effect of the First World War on the The Nicolson Institute in Stornoway.

As a native Gaelic speaker, Donald’s voice can often be heard on BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, while on BBC Radio Four he has featured on Open Book with Mariella Frostrup. He has appeared on TV, on BBC Four’s Birds Britannia, a series looking at the different birds that live in the UK, and on The Last Seabird Summer, which examined the decline of seabirds in the North Atlantic.

Donald also regularly speaks at book festivals and conferences around the world, and has delivered talks at the University of Reykjavik in Iceland; the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland; the Nordic Centre in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands; the Blasket Centre in Dingle, Ireland; and the Pisa International Book Festival in Italy, among others. In 2020, he was elected as a committee member of the Society of Authors in Scotland, which protects the rights and interest of authors.

After 30 years as an English teacher, Donald became a full-time writer in 2012. He now lives and works in Shetland.

(Updated July 27, 2021)