Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon galvanized the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, a novel that drew vividly upon his upbringing in a croft in rural Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century and provide a compelling moral mandate for social and political change in the inter-war period. Gibbon’s compassionate and lyrical study of the pains and pleasures of his heroine Chris Guthrie growing up around the First World War regularly earns him the accolade of his country’s favourite author. However, his literary legacy stretches far beyond the first Gibbon novel; the succeeding volumes of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair chronicle his heroine’s experiences in the modern mill town in Cloud Howe and in the grim industrial city in Grey Granite and explore a wealth of ideological responses – social, cultural, political and philosophical – that are bracingly topical today. In a life cruelly cut short, Gibbon produced an astonishing total of seventeen full-length works, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, demonstrating his versatility as essayist, historian, biographer and fiction writer, all illuminated by his profound humanitarianism. The time is ripe for this fresh reappraisal of the full canon of an author whose fame in recent years has carried well beyond his native Scotland, and whose modernist experimentation with language and narrative earns him a place among the foremost writers of fiction of the twentieth century.

Reviews of Lewis Grassic Gibbon

"Anita Brookner deserves this detailed, sophisticated, brilliant reading that appreciates Brookner's peculiar genius and uncovers the ways in which she 'does indeed write a different kind of novel.' Given the intertextual, allusive nature of Brookner's work and her extraordinary expertise on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art and literature, Dr Mayer's 'misreading' of Brookner's 'performative romanticism' is entirely appropriate."Ann Holbrook, Professor of English at Saint Anselm College