Promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language
David Manderson is a novelist, short story and non-fiction writer. His first novel Lost Bodies was published in 2011. He followed it with two Scotnote study texts about Scottish films with the ASLS before bringing out his fourth work, The Anti-hero’s Journey: the Work and Life of Alan Sharp with Peter Lang in 2023. He has also published widely in magazines, journals and online. He edited Nerve Magazine, ran a spoken word event at the Tchai Ovna cafe for a decade, curated the Real to Reel short film festival at the GFT, and a season of Alan Sharp films at the same venue in 2023.
Few signs of the war remained in 1960s Scotland, but the nuclear presence on the Gare Loch, where the subs edged past Rosneath caravan park where my family went every weekend, was one. Another was the book-rack in the park’s shop, stocked with thrillers with stills from upcoming films on their covers. In due course my […]
Douglas Thompson may well be the most significant Scottish author you’ve yet to read, although for the last twenty years or so he has brought out more than one book a year. I went walking with him in Glasgow’s south side in September to find out more about his latest novel. ‘How many books have […]
Discussions of urban Scottish writing tend, more often than not, to centre on narratives set in Glasgow. This is hardly surprising, since much Scottish fiction from the 1930s onward sprang from the same source. No Mean City (1935) by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley-Long was a notorious portrayal of Scotland’s worst ‘area of deprivation’. Its depiction of […]
Ali Bacon is the author of three novels, two of them published by Linen Press. Writers like her, too easily labelled ‘independently published’, often suffer this kind of literary typecasting that downplays the scale of their achievements. In reality, she and other hard-working authors like her – invariably women – craft their books through years […]
This new novel by Margaret Elphinstone, former Professor of Creative Writing at Strathclyde, is, like much of her other work, ‘mostly historical and about people living on “the edge”’, as she describes it herself, which can also seem similar to science fiction. Its appearance marks her return to long form story-telling after a period of fifteen years. […]
I first met Ely Percy in January 1998 when I was a lecturer at a Further Education college in the south side of Glasgow. I had asked the management if they would allow me to teach creative writing to try to escape the tyranny of the usual timetable. They approved my request, with conditions. First, […]
Blank Pages and Other Stories (2021) is the sixth volume of short stories by the Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty. It is the most recent in a line of fine collections that stretches from Secrets (1977) to Blank Pages’ precursor, Matters of Life & Death (2006). Published between these two, MacLaverty’s fifth novel, Midwinter Break (2017), about an ageing couple’s visit to Amsterdam, seemed […]
Carl MacDougall’s last book, a memoir with the prophetic title Already, Too Late, was launched at an ‘In Memoriam’ event on 15 August 2023, less than five months after his death. His passing was so sudden and unexpected that many people who had known him felt he was still present at the event. Tributes were read and […]
This collection of essays presents to the public and to academics and researchers the first opportunity to read, in a single volume, ideas and arguments published by McArthur as book chapters or journal articles. The pieces are, as their editor Jonathan Murray suggests, the least accessible area of McArthur’s output, and it is a pleasure […]
Dreams of Scottish Youth: A Seventies Odyssey is a long poem sequence which describes Graham Fulton’s years between the ages of eleven and twenty-two. Fulton was recognised early as one of the leading voices of the Itinerant Poets group set up with the encouragement of Tom Leonard in Paisley in the 1980s. Jim Ferguson, Margaret […]
Now in his eighty-seventh year and still one of Scotland’s finest poets, Stewart Conn offers us a new pamphlet. Underwood, a collection of recent work published by Mariscat, is another affirmation of his sensitive yet thorough probing of the world around him, with his focus on the interplay between his humanity and the things he […]
Tracy Patrick is a Paisley poet. This term has historical roots but has been gaining greater contemporary significance in the Scottish writing scene for some decades, with its members now publishing and performing regularly throughout Scotland and beyond it. Not a single group but a collection of individuals who sometimes perform together and sometimes separately, […]
This is the first full collection of the much-neglected poet R. Crombie Saunders, adding to the impressive body of publications produced by Rymour Books. Saunders died in 1991 almost entirely forgotten within the Scottish literary world, but this collection, edited and introduced by his son Donald, also a poet, makes the claim that Saunders’s output, […]
When Walter Scott sat down to plan George IV’s visit to Edinburgh and the pageant that would go along with it in 1824, he knew what he was doing. He was branding a nation, giving it an identity that would last outside itself, something that would be instantly recognizable and travel abroad, something that showed […]