Dani Garavelli

Glasgow

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

Freelance journalist. Bylines @heraldscotland, @guardian, @lrb, @bigissue et al. Waiting for the Van/The Witches’ Pardon/Prosecuting Polmont @BBCR4.

Articles

At the Whisky Bond

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Dani Garavelli

One afternoon last year I walked up a steep incline from Applecross Basin on the Forth and Clyde Canal, stopped under the second pylon I came to and looked out over the monochrome skyscape. I had been told that this was the spot where Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of Books One and Two of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, utters his most famous lines.
US favouring those guilty of Gaza genocide over ones who call it out is outrageous

2 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli

JD Vance recently castigated Europe, citing abortion buffer zones as an attack on ‘the basic liberties of religious Britons’. Graphic: Derek McArthur ON Monday night, I switched on BBC News at Ten to find out more about a horrific incident I’d seen fleeting headlines on earlier in the day. It was a report, from the UN, that 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers had been killed “one by one” by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza.
Reform is ending Scotland’s indyref era

2 weeks ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Dani Garavelli

“Storm clouds are gathering.” So warned Scotland’s first minister John Swinney as he called for a coordinated cross-party resistance—a Scottish cordon sanitaire, if you like—against the far right and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in the run-up to next year’s Holyrood election. There are those who think he had a cheek. In its 18 years in power, the SNP has hardly been a unifying force.
'A missed opportunity': Did the shift from Polmont detention go far enough?

3 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli

William Lindsay and Katie Allan took their own lives (Image: Derek McArthur) When the final children were moved from Polmont Young Offenders Institution last August, those who worked in the youth justice system breathed a sigh of relief. It had long been acknowledged that the jail was no place for under-18s who - regardless of their offences - would be safer, and more likely to be rehabilitated, in one of the county’s four secure units.
Disturbing TV hit Adolescence exposes a chasm that has opened up between generations

1 month ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli

An image from Adolescence on Netflix (Image: Netflix) WHAT does it take, these days, to start a national conversation? The answer would appear to be a bingeable TV or Netflix drama that “touches the heart strings” while “pulling no punches”. First, we had ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which forced a decades-long scandal into the public eye (and resulted in new legislation to exonerate those who had been wrongly convicted).
Blacklisted and imprisoned: The Scots suffragette who could finally be honoured

1 month ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli

Janet Jenny McCallum in Holloway Prison uniform. Right: rare medal. (Image: On Fife) Fife mill worker and trade union activist, Janet McCallum, was jailed for scaling a statue of Richard the Lionheart during a Votes for Women storming of Westminster in 1908. Yet, like most working class suffragettes, her contribution has gone under-acknowledged.
USA is a rogue state and all the certainties that once framed our lives have now gone

1 month ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli

The US president, right, met his Ukrainian counterpart in the Oval Office in scenes that stunned the world (Image: Mystyslav Chernov/AP) WE all have guilty pleasure films. One of mine is A Few Good Men. I watch it almost every time it’s on, not because I am a fan of Tom Cruise or Demi Moore, or because the plot is particularly compelling, but for the iconic “You can’t handle the truth” scene. The audience is not supposed to approve of Jack Nicholson’s monstrous Colonel Nathan Jessep.
Glaswegians - if you want a city rebirth get off the sidelines and stop carping

2 months ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli

Last Saturday, I went for a night walk in Glasgow’s southside. It was Battlefield’s Window Wanderland weekend, so, in theory, my head was tilted skywards in appreciation of the movie-themed artworks gracing the sandstone tenements and townhouses. In one, Elliott and ET were silhouetted against a cratered moonscape. In another, the house from Up rose from the ground floor, as, above, a bespectacled Carl Fredricksen dangled from a flock of balloons.
Acclaimed Scottish author says: 'I lost my mind, I lost my way'

2 months ago | heraldscotland.com | Dani Garavelli |Chris McQueer

Growing up in Glasgow’s East End with his single mum, Tracy, Chris McQueer had a firm idea about the type of man he wasn’t going to be. “There were always rumours about what was going on behind closed doors - like: ‘Oh, he batters his missus’,” he says. “I’d hear the way my mum and my gran used to talk about those men, and I’d think: ‘I never want anyone to talk about me like that’.” A trickier question was what type of man he *should* become.
Dani Garavelli and Malin Hay

2 months ago | lrb.co.uk | Dani Garavelli |Malin Hay

Your browser does not support the audio element. Since 1995, at least 51 prisoners aged 21 and under have died in Scottish prisons. These include Katie Allan and William Lindsay, who shared strong support networks and, despite vastly different life experiences, died in alarmingly similar circumstances. Their deaths were deemed preventable in a long-awaited inquiry that identified a ‘catalogue’ of failures but led to no prosecutions.