Dear Scotland

Over the months I’ve written about some difficult and disturbing books. Duncan McLean’s ‘Bunker Man’ immediately springs to mind, but perhaps Toni Davidson’s 1999 debut novel ‘Scar Culture’ unsettles more than any other Scottish novel I have read. It’s never as salacious as McLean’s novel often becomes, but like ‘Bunker Man’ it deals with abuse; [...]

Alan Spence is one of those writers who seems to stand apart from other contemporary Scottish writers. I’ve been thinking about why this might be, and I think it is a matter of style. If you think of the adjectives that are most often applied to modern Scottish fiction they will include; grim, gritty, urban, [...]

There are times when a piece of art comes along and nothing is ever the same again. Such arrivals fulfill three functions; they come to represent their time, they change what will follow, and, often brutally, they kill what had preceded them. Or at least appear to at the time. Think of the impact Joyce’s [...]

Writing about music in prose is difficult to get right. Fictional bands are judged against the great Spinal Tap and most readers will be aware of all the clichés that accompany rock n’ roll and those who play it from the many biographies of bands (personal recommendations are ‘The Hammer of the Gods’ which details [...]

When we think of modern Scottish literature it is usually accepted that we are considering writing from the 1970s to the present day. However, there are writers who spoil that neat picture, writers who were being published in the 1950s and 60s and continued to produce new work into the latter decades of the 20th [...]

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Every story has a beginning, middle and an end. Ali Smith’s 2004 novel ‘The Accidental’ takes this truth and plays with it in a manner that is inventive, witty and incredibly assured. Smith had been winning awards and a growing readership since her [...]

There can be little argument that contemporary Scottish fiction is Central Belt centric. Most of the tales told come from, and are normally set in, the area dissected and connected by the M8. However that situation is slowly changing and a writer who shows the way, and who has come to be one of my [...]

There is a quote on the cover of my paperback of Duncan McLean’s ‘Bunker Man’ from Cosmopolitan Magazine that claims ‘Duncan McLean is Scotland’s answer to Roddy Doyle’. If a fan of Doyle were to pick up ‘Bunker Man’ on this recommendation they would be in for a shock, particularly if their knowledge of Doyle [...]

It’s perhaps difficult to sufficiently express just how popular Big Country were for a few years in the mid-1980s. Albums went straight to number 1, there were regular Top of the Pops appearances, they were lauded in music publications from pop paper Smash Hits to the weekly NME and Melody Maker and were also well-liked and respected by many [...]