This island is our punishment, this island and one another's company, to the death. (J.M. Coetzee, Foe, p. 37) St Kilda is the furthest western archipelago in Scotland; its location and the particular way of life of its inhabitants have captured the imagination of many travel-writers, and of some novelists or poets and also some playwrights (like Sue Glover, The Straw Chair). Of these literary representations, I have selected Island of Wings, a novel published in 2011 and written by Karin Altenberg. It is set on the island of Hirta, also commonly called St Kilda after the name of the archipelago. Island of Wings can be best described as a biofiction, that is to say, as Altenberg confesses in a paratext to the novel: "This is a fictionalised portrait of the historic lives of the Rev. Neil Mackenzie and his wife. It builds largely on documentary sources […] and published research. […] I have taken a number of liberties regarding the individual characters and their personalities, but the account is accurate in most historical details." (p. 310). Altenberg explores a key colonial moment in the history of St Kilda. Reverend Neil Mackenzie, the protagonist of the novel, was indeed a pastor for the Church of Scotland. He and his wife, Elizabeth, spent thirteen years on St Kilda from July 1830 to May 1843, not only evangelizing the locals but also reforming most of their traditional customs. 2 This paper will focus on the representation of St Kilda as a place of alienation before examining the recurrence of death. Postcolonial considerations and the symbolic imagery used by Altenberg will guide us through this reading, but because of the biofictional nature of the novel we will never lose sight of the true history and lives of the Mackenzies.

An island, because of its remoteness, is first and foremost a place of isolation, banishment and confinement. This feature has always been characteristic of Hirta. Because of its distance from the mainland, the island had for instance been previously used in the