David Manderson

David (Dave) Manderson was born in Westerton in Glasgow and attended Glasgow Academy in the city’s west end from 1966-73. From there he went to St Andrews University, where he met Alex Salmond and graduated with an MA in English Language and Literature. After university he worked in a variety of jobs, including shipping clerk and warehouse manager, before leaving the UK to go on the road as the roadie for the Scottish folk band, The Tannahill Weavers. Three years later he returned to the west of Scotland and started teaching.

In the late 1970s he began reading his fiction to audiences at small local venues such as The Scotia Bar and the Tchai Ovna café. He had already been hanging around places, mostly pubs, where he thought he could meet other writers. His first published story was in Northern Lights magazine in Aberdeen in 1980. From then on he published sporadically in small publications, including West Coast Magazine (1991), Gutter (Freight Books: 2011), The Living Tradition (1998), Ecloga (2005) Valve (Freight, 2011 and 2012), and in anthologies such as A Spiel Amang Us: The Scotia Writers’ Prize (Mainstream: 1990), Word Jig: New Writing from Scotland (Hanging Loose Press: 2003), and New Writing Scotland (ASLS: 2012 and 2013). He also helped hang the ‘Five Glasgow Artists’ exhibition (Alasdair Gray, Alasdair Taylor, John Connelly, Alan Fletcher and Carole Gibbons) at the McLellan Galleries in 1986.

In 1992 he founded the Real to Reel Short Film Festival which ran at the Glasgow Film Theatre for nine years, and in 2002 launched the creative writing magazine Nerve, which published early work by Louise Welsh, Zoe Strachan and Rachel Seiffert among others, editing it with Linda Jaxson and Brian Whittingham. It was supported by the Scottish Arts Council and ran for five issues. In 2004 he was awarded a New Writers Award by the same body. He ran the Reading Allowed poetry evenings at the Tchai Ovna Café in the West End for over a decade. After his MA in Creative Writing he went on to a Ph.D at Strathclyde University, writing a novel as his thesis, graduating in 2006 without being asked to make any changes at the viva. That novel, Lost Bodies, was published by Kennedy and Boyd in 2012 to a warm reception. It was the first time a creative work had been awarded a PhD in Scotland. In 2014 he co-authored a book with the director Eleanor Yule on ‘Scottish Miserabilism’ (Luath Press). In 2017 he won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust and spent a month at the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-Sur-Loing in north-central France. His study Scotnotes – Rob Roy (2009) and Local Hero (2010) – were published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in Glasgow University, as were journal articles by him on James Hogg, the Blackwood’s group and the film industry in the Trossachs. He also co-authored an academic article on creative writing and wayfaring. Meanwhile he was mentored by the novelist, playwright and short story writer Carl MacDougall.

In 2023, after three years independent research, he produced his monograph, The Anti-Hero’s Journey: the Life and Work of Alan Sharp (Peter Lang, Zurich). It was widely welcomed by the public and by academics and practitioners in the film/television industries, and culminated in an Alan Sharp season, From Greenock to Hollywood, at the Glasgow Film Theatre. The event was the first time the Greenock-born writer’s films had been shown in his native city for over fifty years. He is currently completing more work on Sharp and new fiction. He writes regular book reviews for the online magazine The Bottle Imp, news items for Byeline Scotland, and serves on the Board of Scottish PEN. He lives in Glasgow with his family. In 2025, he will take part in the Inverclyde Film Festival at another screening of Sharp’s films in the Waterfront Cinema in Greenock.

You can see a short animated film by Samantha Hendry of his poem Expedition here.