THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

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Elaine Thomson is a Scottish author, who has written several historical novels under the name E. S. Thomson. Her work has been longlisted for the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger, and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize, the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award and the William McIlvanney Crime Book of the Year Award. Hawthorn is the first in a planned quartet of ghost stories, all set in Scotland during the four ‘turning points’ of the year: Samhain, midwinter, midsummer and the spring equinox. The second book in the series, Saltwater, is coming in 2026.

Elaine has a PhD in the social history of medicine, and works as a university lecturer by day, and writes by night. She lives in Edinburgh with her two sons.

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Since 2007, Murray has been Bradley Professor at the University of Glasgow and successively Dean, Vice-Principal and Pro Vice Principal at the University. Outside the University, he serves on the National Trust for Scotland Board (2019-27) and Investment Committee, as well as acting as Co-chair of the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance, chair of the Governance Board of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs, and member of the Board of the European Alliance for Social Science and Humanities.

He is on the Advisory Board of NISE, the Europe-wide research group bringing together over 40 research centres working on national identities, and has held visiting appointments at universities worldwide including New York University; Notre Dame, Charles University, Prague; Trinity College, Dublin; Auburn; the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales; and Yale.

Murray’s academic work in the words of a recent UK Research and Innovation report is ‘world-leading and field-defining’, reflected in some 30 books.

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John came to live in the Highlands of Scotland in 1968 to work with the celebrated author and naturalist, Gavin Maxwell, of Ring of Bright Water fame. After Maxwell’s sudden death in 1969, John decided to commemorate Gavin’s work and writing by finishing the story of the Maxwell otters. This first book, published in 1972, is called The White Island.

The success of this book led to the creation of the first Field Studies Centre for the Highlands and Islands.  Since then, over 25,000 adults and 100,000 children have passed through the welcoming doors of Aigas Field Centre. In recent years the environmental education for schools programme independently run by the Aigas Trust (set up by John in 1980) has become the Highlands’ principal provider, handling some 5,000 school children every year.

 In his best-seller, Song of the Rolling Earth (2003) now in its 10th reprint, and its sequel, Nature’s Child (2004),  John celebrates his passion for nature and wildlife.  These books have been widely acclaimed; they were followed in 2010 by At The Water’s Edge and by Gods of the Morning, published in March 2015.

In 2001 John was awarded an OBE for services to nature conservation, and he has received honorary doctorates from two Scottish universities for his contribution to nature writing.

In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural Writer’s Prize by the Richard Jefferies Society for “Gods of the Morning” which was published in 2015.
In the same year, John was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Geddes Award for services to conservation, and made an honorary FRSGS.

His latest book, The Dun Cow Rib, was published in August 2017 in hardback and the paperback version was published in June 2018.  This book was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize 2018, and is now available as an audiobook and audio CD.

In November 2018, John received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the RSPB’s Nature of Scotland’s Awards in Edinburgh.

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Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and long-form journalism.

Her first book, Thicker Than Water, about frontier violence in colonial Australia, was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment—about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places—is out now. It has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Wainwright Prize for writing on global conservation, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction.

Cal’s journalistic writing has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others. She is the deputy editor of the literary recommendations site Five Books, and a regular contributor to The Guardian. Cal was previously writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019, and in 2022 was announced the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2023 she received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

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It was a dark and stormy night (well, it was actually an unusually warm evening in Edinburgh, Scotland) when Number One Sunday Times bestselling author V.E. Schwab, known for The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, proposed an absurd idea to longtime friend and screenwriter Cat Clarke: that they should write a book together. Victoria had made quite a name for herself, but had sworn she’d never co-write a novel.

While Cat, following a tumultuous career as an editor and the author of several YA novels, including Girlhood and Entangled, had fled the publishing industry to work in the even more tumultuous film industry, swearing she’d never return to books.

And yet, fate – and an irresistible idea – made liars of them both.

That night, Evelyn Clarke was born.

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Francesca is an author and academic. She writes historical fiction. Her latest novel is Saltblood (Bloomsbury), based on the true story of Mary Read, a historical figure from piracy’s Golden Age. Saltblood was a Sunday Times top-twenty bestseller, and won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

Francesca grew up in lutruwita/Tasmania, gained her PhD from the University of Melbourne, and was a senior lecturer and a Visiting Writing Fellow at the University of Chester. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies in both Australia and England, and a collection of poetry, Bodies of Water, was published in 2006. In 2010 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. She lives in naarm/Melbourne, on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation.

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Lindz McLeod is an award-winning queer, working-class, Scottish writer and editor who dabbles in the surreal.

She was the Competition Secretary of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club from 2019-2023, and was elected as their Club President in 2023. Her work has been taught in schools and universities, made into avant-garde opera, has been displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee, and optioned for television. Lindz is an experienced freelance editor and writing coach for both fiction and non-fiction, as well as an accomplished workshop host. Along with her fiancée Z.K. Abraham, Lindz hosts the Cinema Worms podcast which reviews everything from blockbusters to indie screenings.

Lindz has read for various magazines and competitions including the Edinburgh Short Story Award and Edinburgh Flash Fiction award, and has also judged multiple fiction competitions. Additionally, she is a full member of the SFWA, the Scottish Writers Association, and the Federation of Writers (Scotland). She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart prize multiple times, as well as for Best Small Fictions. She has been longlisted for the British Science Fiction Awards and published in Best British SF 2025.

In 2019, Lindz was awarded a Masters in Creative Writing from the Open University. In 2023, she began a PhD in Creative Writing with Manchester Metropolitan University—her thesis centers around vision and intimacy in literature, with a focus on broadening accessibility. She writes equally comfortably in English and Scots, and has been teaching herself Gaelic for two years. Recently, she has taken up acting. She very rarely sleeps.

In 2022, her flash story ‘Cake By The Ocean’ was nominated for the annual Best Small Fictions anthology. In 2023, her flash story ‘Upper Bout’ was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top Fifty. Her co-written story ‘Shark Facts My Grandma Told Me’ was mentioned on the Book Riot article Halloween Short Fiction: 9 Short Stories to Get You Ready for Spooky Season, where it was called “a masterclass in thriller writing — mounting tension, unabashed horror, and a killer twist at the end.” Her 2023 story “The Immortal Game”, a noir thriller told in chess moves from a real game, was voted one of the Apex Community Recommended Reads 2023, with reader Ryan Cole describing it as “one I love and think about often… captivating and fun”. Her 2024 story ‘Junior,’ about a man seeking to overcome his grief about a miscarriage by purchasing a Forever Baby, was longlisted for the British Fantasy Awards.

Nicholas Binge is a bestselling author of speculative thrillers that blend big sci-fi concepts with psychological horror. He also writes crime and thriller novels under the pseudonym Nick Brucker, with his debut White Smoke set to release in 2027. His work has been, or is being, translated into over twenty languages and several of his novels are in active development for either film or TV.

Notably, his novel Dissolution, which was hailed as one of the best thrillers of 2025 by The New York Times, is being adapted into a major motion picture by Sony Pictures, with Oscar-nominated screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Birdbox) penning the script. In 2023, his breakout novel Ascension was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Pick, finalist for the Goodreads’ Choice Awards and Ignotus Award, and named a ‘best book of the year’ by Vulture, Goodreads, The LA Times, and The Sunday Times.

Binge has lived across Asia and Europe — from Singapore to Switzerland to Hong Kong —before settling in Edinburgh, where he lectures in Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University and co-hosts the Binge Reading Book Club podcast. Beyond fiction, he has written for The Guardian, Literary Hub, and other leading outlets, and is a regular speaker at book festivals across Scotland and the UK.

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Fiona Mozley is the author of two previous novels, Elmet and Hot Stew. She is the winner of a Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Women’s Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Edinburgh.

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Stephen Rutt is a naturalist and the award-winning author of five books. Despite falling into a river when he was two years old, he has never learned to swim. But water has fascinated him ever since. Birds have also been his life’s guiding passion since he was 14 and he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t an obsessive reader.

His books – The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds (2019), Wintering: A Season with Geese (2019), The Eternal Season: Ghosts of Summers Past, Present and Future (2021), The Saltmarsh Library (2025) and The Waterlands (2026) – tell the story of our environment and the species we share it with. The Seafarers won the Saltire Society’s first book award, Wintering was listed by The Times as one of the best nature books of 2019 and The Eternal Season was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s best non-fiction book award. He has also been shortlisted for the Anne Brown essay prize and won the Royal Literary Fund’s JB Priestley award. His writing has been published in The Guardian, The Scotsman, Granta.com and Caught by the River.

He lives in Dumfries, Scotland with his daughter and spends most of his time birdwatching in the rain.

Grant McPhee is a filmmaker and music writer from Scotland. His feature-length documentary, Big Gold Dream was adapted into book form as Hungry Beat with co-writer, Douglas MacIntyre.

His documentary Teenage Superstars was awarded ‘Pick of the Day’ by the Guardian, The Times and Telegraph and was one of Rolling Stone’s Ten Essential Music Documentaries.

His narrative films include Far From the Apple Tree, which was listed by The BFI as one of their 35 Great British Horror Films.

Andrew’s short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Banshee and Winter Papers, as well as in TOWN & COUNTRY: The Faber Book of New Irish Stories, edited by Kevin Barry. In September 2017, his debut novel ONE STAR AWAKE was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for debut novelists. It has been described by the Irish Examiner as ‘mesmerising, inventive, heart-wrenching, and brilliantly realised. The most interesting debut of 2017.’

His second book, THE MYSTERY OF LOVE, a unique and moving reimagining of the relationship between Oscar and Constance Wilde, was published in 2020. His third novel, INSTANT FIRES, was published 2022. Andrew’s new novel, BEST FRIENDS, is published in May 2025.

Prior to writing full-time, Andrew was for many years Head of Development at the Irish Film Board. There, he nurtured numerous Irish feature-films, including the Oscar-nominated animated feature SONG OF THE SEA; Lenny Abrahamson’s WHAT RICHARD DID; and the groundbreaking comedy GOOD VIBRATIONS. Andrew also writes screenplays, and is at work on two films: THE BEST BAR IN BAGHDAD, a comedy for Alan Moloney at Parallel Films; and THIS IS THE LIFE, a bittersweet love-story for the director Brian Durnin. Both films are in funded development with the Irish Film Board.

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Colin MacIntyre is a multi-award winning musician, producer, author for adults and children, and playwright. Born into a family of storytellers and writers, he was raised on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides and has released eight acclaimed albums to date, most notably under the moniker Mull Historical Society.

His debut novel The Letters of Ivor Punch (W&N/Orion) won the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award and he has just adapted it for the stage at A Play, A Pie & A Pint in Spring 2019. He was voted Scotland’s Top Creative Talent at the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards. His memoir Hometown Tales: Highlands & Hebrides (The Boy in the Bubble) (W&N Books/Orion) and his first book for children, The Humdrum Drum with accompanying music (Little Door Books), were published in 2018.

Colin is a contributor to several writing and song writing workshop programmes, including at Scotland’s National Writing Centre, Moniack Mhor. He performs and chairs From Stage to Page, a storytelling show with fellow musician-paperback writers featuring readings and songs. He has led the children’s feeding and educational charity Mary’s Meals in London. Colin enjoys words and music events for both adults and children.

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​Jean Menzies is an author, presenter, and as of 2022 Dr Jean Zacharski Menzies, PhD in ancient history! She is Edinburgh born and based. You might know her from her YouTube channel JeansThoughts where she’s been discussing books, writing, studying, and ancient history since 2012.

In 2020 she won the BAMB Breakthrough Author award for her first book, Greek Myths: Meet the heroes, gods, and monsters of ancient Greece, which was published by DK and is aimed at children aged 7-11. Since then she has gone on to write nonfiction books on history and mythology for all ages.

In 2025 her debut adult fantasy novel was published by Michael Joseph, Penguin. The Lady of the Lake is a sapphic reimagining of Arthurian legend packed full of female rage, Celtic mythology, and lots and lots of magic. 

Her research interests lie in the history of women’s lives in antiquity. Whether it be their sex lives or legal rights, she is fascinated by it all. Her PhD thesis dealt with the politicisation of sexual violence against women in democratic Athenian rhetoric and she has also contributed to such volumes as Revisiting Rape in Antiquity (published by Bloomsbury). ​She has also written on the significance of Greek Mythology in modern day LGBTQIA+ literature.

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Alan Windram is the author of four children’s picture books including the 2019 BookBug Picture Book Prize winning One Button Benny. He is also a publisher and co-founder of indie children’s publisher Little Door Books. He writes the sort of stories that he loved reading as a young person – fun adventures with the odd twist and moral tale.

His picture book events are highly interactive full of songs, images, stories, audience interaction and participation. There is often some robot dancing too! He has taken his events all over Scotland and Northern England working in schools, libraries and book festivals.

The picture book events are for ages 3-6. For late primary age children, he does an event called ‘Inspiration to Publication’ based on his award-winning picture book, demystifying how a book is published, taking the children on the books journey from a blank page to winning the biggest picture book award in Scotland. During this event he shows lots of images on his writing process, how he started out as an author, the process of how the books characters were created by the illustrator, printing processes, publishing, foreign versions of the book, and writing original songs for book events.

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Abigail Abbas began her career in financial PR. She left the City to raise her children and worked as an illustrator, later embarking on an MA in Illustration at Camberwell College of Art.

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Agnes Owens is one of Scotland’s most original but often overlooked short fiction authors. Readers are seeking out undiscovered classics from the recent past, and these seven works are hidden literary gems that are sure to engage readers and find a wider audience. This May, Polygon will publish new editions of Gentlemen of the West, introduced by Dani Garavelli, Like Birds in the Wilderness, introduced by Kirsty Logan, A Working Mother, introduced by Kirstin Innes, and For the Love of Willie, introduced by Liz Lochhead. Four months later, in September 2026, Polygon will publish new editions of Bad Attitudes, introduced by Jenni Fagan, Lean Tales: The Collected Short Stories, introduced by William Letford, and Jen’s Party, introduced by Chitra Ramaswamy.

Agnes Owens was first published by Polygon in 1984 with her novel Gentlemen of the West. It was Peter Kravitz who was instrumental in bringing her work to Polygon. Peter was an editor at Polygon in the 1980s who focussed on and lead the field in publishing new Scottish fiction, a tradition that Polygon continues to this day.

Since 1984, Owens has been published to critical acclaim by Bloomsbury, Fourth Estate and Jonathan Cape. Her work has been praised and championed by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Liz Lochhead, Ali Smith and, most recently, Douglas Stuart.

In 2008, Polygon published the collected novellas and the collected short stories which featured new work. These two titles have been steady sellers and key to the Polygon backlist. The novellas were licensed from Bloomsbury, but Polygon recently acquired the rights to publish these new editions. Since then, rights to Owens’ work has been sold to the US, Italy and Spain.

The books will feature a striking new series design that features artworks by Joan Eardley. Eardley, one of Scotland’s most original and admired contemporary artists of her generation, was working and painting during the time that Owens’ books were set. Her expressive landscapes of the northeast of Scotland and her raw, yet tender, depictions of children in 1950s Glasgow perfectly capture the aesthetics of Owens’ work.

Agnes Owens was always a writer, although for the majority of her life she was preoccupied with making a living and domesticity. She married twice, brought up seven children and variously worked as a typist, cleaner and factory worker. It wasn’t until she attended an evening creative writing course – taught by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Liz Lochhead – that she wrote her first novel Gentlemen of the West, published in 1984 by Polygon to widespread critical acclaim; she would go on to write a further five novellas, including A Working Mother and For the Love of Willie, and three short-story collections. She died in 2014.

Lyndsey is a Scottish author published in over eighty magazines and anthologies, including Apex, Analog, Weird Tales, and Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction. She’s a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Finalist, and former Hawthornden Fellow. Her longer works include Have You Decided on Your Question (Shortwave), Limelight and Other Stories (Shortwave) The Girl With Barnacles for Eyes (Split Scream Volume Five, Tenebrous Press), and Dark Crescent (Luna Press).