Dear Scotland

Let’s reflect on the state of Scottish literature of the 1980’s. James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Iain Banks and Iain Rankin came to wider public attention and William McIllvaney continued to write gritty stories of West of Scotland hard men. As another cultural icon of the 80’s Frank McAvennie might have asked; ‘wherz the burdz?’

I recently received a copy of Minstrels Poets and Vagabonds, the history of rock music in Glasgow from the sixties up to the present day. Written by promoter and DJ Robert Fields the book is a fascinating history of a musical genre that is at best ignored, at worst ridiculed.

I think that it says almost everything about the year of Homecoming that I have almost no thoughts about it at all, but then I suppose it wasn’t for me. Some insist that the year has been successful in promoting the country around the world, but I’m not sure how such things are calculated.

Rarely can an epigraph have summed up the novel to come better than the Hunter S. Thompson quote that appears before John Niven’s 2008 novel ‘Kill Your Friends’. It reads as follows: ‘The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men [...]

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the Scottish Songbook concert at the Concert Hall in Glasgow last Saturday night (Thanks Chris!) I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but it was a grand evening. More contemporary than I was expecting. Performers included Karine Polwart, who was the director of the evening, Ricky [...]

Andrew O’Hagan’s Booker nominated 2006 novel Be Near Me tackles themes which are common in modern Scottish literature, but in a manner which is very much of his own styling. Religion, politics, bigotry, class, nationality and sexuality are explored in the novel but with a more considered eye than many of his contemporaries.  There is [...]

In the first of his monthly columns on Scottish Literature, Alistair Braidwood takes a closer look at ‘Morvern Callar’ by Alan Warner, the 1995 novel that was later made into a film by Lynne Ramsay. Next month Alistair will examine Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘Be Near Me’.

There’s more to life than books you know, but not much more…
You rarely hear the question asked; ‘What is Scottish music?’ or ‘What is Scottish film?’ The same goes for theatre, painting, or even comedy. In all these examples the question of their Scottishness or otherwise has long since mattered less than the argument which [...]