Promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language
J P O’Malley is a freelance journalist living in South London. His work has appeared in many publications including: The New Statesman, The Economist, The Spectator, Quietus.com, The Asia Literary Review, The Sunday Times, and The Irish Examiner. Follow JP on Twitter: @johnpaulomallez
Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —TS Eliot Reality, Reality, Jackie Kay’s latest collection of short-stories, explores the thin line that separates art and the supposed real world. In these fifteen stories, fourteen of which are written in an intimate first-person voice, Kay brings the reader on a journey with the lonely and dispossessed, as they […]
Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor. His first collection of short stories ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’ was published in the United States in 1973. It was another nine years before his first novel ‘The Busconductor Hines’ appeared. Kelman has received several […]
It’s Friday at 10am in a remote field in Fife. John Burnside is taking his morning walk, whilst simultaneously attempting to conduct a conversation with me down a dodgy telephone line. Within seconds he’s speaking about a concept of happiness — or lack of it — that goes back to philosophers such as Nietzsche and […]
Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee. He moved to London in 1984 to work as a jazz musician, and eventually began to write poetry. In 1993, Faber published his debut collection, Nil Nil, which won the Forward prize. In total, he’s published seven collections and three books of aphorisms. Paterson has won the prestigious […]
Irvine Welsh begins his twelfth book to date with two quotations. The first is Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that: “There is no such thing as society”. The second is from the eminent American novelist, Herman Melville, who once described the mystical blackness of puritanical gloom as: “That Calvinistic sense of innate depravity and original sin […]