THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Born in Aberdeen in 1886, Seton Gordon was only 21 when he published his first book, Birds of the Loch and Mountain. Over the next sixty years, Gordon was one of the most highly regarded writer of books on the flora and fauna of the Scottish highlands. Indeed, it has been suggested that “for the first three decades of the twentieth century Seton Gordon was the only full-time practising naturalist in Britain”.

Gordon was a gifted wildlife photographer, and took some of the earliest pictures of Golden Eagles in their eyries. As well as writing, Gordon toured round Britain giving lectures and exhibitions of his photography, usually dressed in a kilt and bunnet. He wrote 27 books, but only two remain in print: Days With the Golden Eagle and Hebridean Memories. His final book, Highland Summer, was written in 1971, just six years before his death. His essays appeared all the leading Scottish newspapers. Gordon’s writing greatly influenced later nature writers such as Tom Weir, Mike Tomkies, Jim Crumley.

A biography of Seton Gordon was written by Raymond Eagle in 1991, but is unfortunately now out of print. Some of Seton Gordon’s essays and photographs have been collected in Hamish Brown’s book, Seton Gordon’s Scotland: An Anthology. Seton Gordon died in 1977.

Scoular Anderson is a children’s author and illustrator who has written over seventy books, and illustrated over 100 others. Born Tom Scoular Anderson in Sunderland, he was raised in Dunoon in Argyll where his mother preferred to call him Scoular.

He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, with the intention of becoming a book illustrator, but it took a long time before he was first published. In the meantime he worked as a newspaper seller in London and later as an illustrator for London University. Anderson returned to Scotland in 1976, where he taught art at Cumbernauld High School for a number of years. He now lives in Argyll, where he continues to write and illustrate.

Author Sara Sheridan was born in Edinburgh and studied English at Trinity College, Dublin. She spent a short time running an art gallery in Ireland, before returning to Edinburgh in 1991. She started writing full time for her 1998 novel Truth or Dare.

Sara is now based in Glasgow and writes a range of historical novels, including The Secret Mandarin, Secret of the Sands, On Starlit Sea, The Fair Botanists and The Secrets of Blythswood Square.

She has also written for children – her picture book I’m Me has appeared on CBeebies three times. Tipped in Company and GQ magazines, she has been nominated for a Young Achiever Award. She received a Scottish Library Award for Truth or Dare, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Book Prize. She co-wrote two short films one of which was nominated for a SkyMoviesMax Award.

An occasional journalist and blogger, Sara appears on BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and blogs for the Guardian and the London Review of Books. She has written articles for a variety of newspapers from the Scotsman to the Daily Express. She is a twitter evangelist and a self-confessed swot. Sara sits on the Committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland where she recently was responsible for negotiating a pioneering service level agreement between Scottish) writers and publishers, in tandem with Publishing Scotland.

She is a member of the Historical Writers Association and the Crime Writers Association. Sara mentors fledgling writers for the Scottish Book Trust and appears regularly as an after-dinner speaker at a variety of corporate events.

Ruth Thomas is a novelist and short-story writer. Her first story collection was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Saltire Society First Book Awards, and her second received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her first novel Things to Make and Mend received a Good Housekeeping Book Award. The Home Corner (2013) is her second novel.

Ruth was born in Kent and now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children. She is currently a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow.

Russel D McLean is a crime writer hailing from Dundee; he describes himself as ‘an author, reviewer and general miscreant’. His short stories have been published in many crime magazines (both on and offline). He also reviews for Waterstone’s Books Quarterly, Crime Spree and writes a regular column for the International Thriller Writers Association.

His debut novel The Good Son was published in 2008 to great acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award in 2010. John Connolly described it as ‘the most exciting, and gripping, Scottish crime fiction début of recent years’. A sequel – The Lost Sister – is published by Five Leaves Publications. His novel Ed’s Dead was called ‘A really authentic and remarkable read!’ by bestselling author Martina Cole.

Scriptwriter Rosy Barnes was raised in Edinburgh, and later studied Fine Art and English Literature at Exeter University. She also took an MA in Theatre Directing at the University of East Anglia. She started her own theatre company while living in Dublin, eventually touring Ireland and Scotland with her play Bimbo.

She now lives in Edinburgh with her partner, where she writes plays for theatre and radio, and reviews theatre. Her first novel, Sadomasochism for Accountants, was published in February 2009.

Ron Butlin was appointed the Edinburgh Makar in May 2008, taking over from Valerie Gilles. Butlin, who was born in Edinburgh, has been writing poetry, prose and plays since the 1970s. Having worked various as a footman, a male model, and a barnacle-scraper on barges in the River Thames, is now a freelance journalist working for the Sunday Herald.

He has held a number of writer-in-residence positions, with Edinburgh University (1982, 1985), Midlothian council (1989-1990), the Craigmiller Literary Trust in Edinburgh (1997-1998), and St Andrews University (1998-1999).

His books have won a number of SAC awards; the first for the collection The Tilting Room in 1983. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, the writer Regi Claire. Butlin’s most recent book is the novel No More Angels.

Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow, and studied for an MA at the city’s university and a B.Litt at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his 1999 novel The Lantern Bearers, which won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award, and is inspired by an essay of the same name by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Lantern Bearers was selected as one of the 100 Best Scottish Books of all Time.

Ronald Frame He writes short fiction set in the fictional Scottish village of Carnbeg, some of which have been anthologised.

Frame has also won the Samuel Becket Prize for the novel and TV play Paris. He has written widely for TV and Radio, and his first story A Winter Journey was nominated for three Sony Awards.

Rod Macdonald is a bestselling author of books focused on diving. His titles are must haves for anyone involved in the mysterious and exciting world of diving.

He began diving in the early 1980s and developed a love for shipwrecks after his first dive in the Scapa Flow. His writing career began upon the realisation that there was little information available on German wrecks. The dynamism of the subject has led to four editions of Dive Scapa Flow.

Rod went on to write several other dive manuals which include Dive Scotland’s Greatest Wrecks, Into The Abyss and The Darkness Below.

Along with his dive buddy, Paul, he runs Dive Charters out of Stonehaven where divers can visit the sites that feature in Rod’s beautiful books.

His latest book, Great British Shipwrecks, will be published in October 2012. It covers his transition from deep air diving to trimix diving – where helium gas mixes are used to make deeper diving safer.

A consistent blogger keeping his followers up to date with his news and views, find out more here.

Rodge Glass is originally from Cheshire where he had a Jewish upbringing (of sorts), with a sortie to a Catholic school and some time spent at a Kibbutz in Israel. He then attended Strathclyde University before embarking on the famous M.Litt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, where he was tutored by James Kelman and Janice Galloway.

Glass spent a year back in England before deciding to return to his spiritual home, Glasgow. His first novel, No Fireworks, took three years to write before Faber and Faber published it in 2005.

While studying at Glasgow University Glass became close to one of his tutors, Alasdair Gray, the Scottish writer and artist, and became his assistant. This relationship led to Glass being commissioned by Bloomsbury to write a biography of Gray. The book will go towards his PhD, which he is undertaking at Glasgow University.

His second novel published Hope for Newborns was published in 2008. He writes book reviews and articles for The Herald and the Scotsman and has written for the Big Issue and City Life magazines in Manchester. Glass’s most recent novel is Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs.

Roddy Lumsden published ten books of poetry. His last book, So Glad I’m Me (2017), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Originally from St Andrews, he lived in London where he taught at City University and Morley College. He edited work on several prize-winning poetry collections and was organiser and host of the reading series BroadCast in London. A popular performer of his work, he read widely in the UK and the US and in Sweden, Ireland and the Philippines.

Former Vice Chair of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, he was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and several others and was awarded an ACE International Fellowship at the Banff Center in Ontario in 2001. He also carried out several residency projects, including being poet-in-residence to the music industry and in a five-star hotel and golf resort.

Robin Robertson is an award-winning poet, hailing from Scone, in Perthshire, but now living and working in London.

Robertson has written three collections of critically acclaimed poetry: A Painted Field, (winner of the 1997 Forward Poetry Prize and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award), Slow Air (2002), and most recently Swithering (2006), which was shortlisted for the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize, winner of the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize, and winner of the Scottish Arts Council Poetry Award.

As well as this illustrious catalogue of work, he has also compiled and edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of their Public Shame (2004), which is a collection of seventy commissioned pieces by international authors.

Robertson has also received the E. M. Forster Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, an award given annually to Irish or British writer to fund a period of travel around the United States.

In 2013 Robertson’s Hill of Doors was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Born John Robin Jenkins in the Lanarkshire village of Flemington in 1912, Jenkins was a prolific but not always successful author during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. He his most famous for his novel The Cone-Gatherers, which is often studied at Scottish schools as a Higher English set text.

After attending Hamilton Academy, Jenkins studied English at the University of Glasgow, and graduated in 1936. He was an English teacher in Glasgow for a number of years, moving to the Borders at the start of WWII. A conscientious objector to the war, he worked for the Forestry Service in Argyll. He first started writing after the war, and his first novel, So Gaily Sings The Lark, was published in 1951. He later moved abroad, working for the British Council in in Afghanistan, Spain and Borneo. In 1968 he returned to Scotland, and became a full-time writer two years later.

Jenkins has written around thirty novels, and in 2002 was awarded the Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun prize by the Saltire Society for his lifetime achievement as a writer. He was also awarded an OBE in 1999.

Robin Jenkins died in 2005, aged 92; the novel The Pearl-Fishers was posthumously published in 2007 after being discovered in a drawer by his daughter.

One of Edinburgh’s most famous literary sons, Robert Lewis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. He was a poorly child, and ill-health plagued him throughout his life. Stevenson came from a line of famous engineers – both his father and grandfather were successful lighthouse engineers [c.f. Belle Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons].

At eighteen, he shortened his name, and changed the spelling of Lewis. Stevenson studied engineering at university, but switched to law. Then, at twenty-one, he declared his intention to become a writer. Both his father Thomas and his Nanny Alison Cunningham [‘Cummy’] read to him frequently, particularly religious stories from the Bible and from the Covenanters. His knowledge of Scottish history influenced novels such as Kidnapped (chosen by Edinburgh City of Literature as their first One City, One Book title) and The Master of Ballantrae. RLS married American divorcee Fanny Osbourne (a controversial choice) in 1880.

Believing the the healing powers of a better climate than that of Scotland, Stevenson and his family travelled widely, living in Switzerland, France and Hawaii. It was during his time that he had some of his biggest successes. Treasure Island is an exciting tale of adventure, piracy and travel (themes he would return to often), while The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a haunting psychological tale. He also wrote travel books, such as Travels with a donkey in the Cévennes and In the South Seas.

Stevenson finally settled in Samoa in 1892, where the local tribe named him Tusitala – ‘storyteller’ – but died in 1884 of a brain haemorrhage.

One of Scotland’s medieval makars, relatively little is known about Robert Henryson (sometimes spelt Henrysoun), but some reasonable assumptions can be made about his background in examining his work. He is believed to have attended Glasgow University and has also been associated with Dunfermline as a schoolmaster, lawyer or notary public. The scope of subjects referred to in his works indicates that he was an academic – a reference to Henryson in a poem by William Dunbar suggests he had a Masters degree and also places his date of death (from dysentery) at some point before 1505. Along with William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, Robert Henryson is considered to be one of the ‘The Makars’ of the northern Renaissance known for their skilful use of verse and lyrical style.

One Henryson’s most famous works, the Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian, is a cycle of thirteen fables in the Aesopic tradition that translates the original European tales into middle Scots with Henryson’s own literary touch. The fables, though a common setting at the time, are told in a way that elevates their status into a high art form and are a particularly complex and significant example of the genre. Orpheus and Eurydice is another of Henryson’s long works and is an interpretation of a Greek myth more commonly read in Latin at the time. While The Testament of Cresseid takes its title character from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, it is an original work that goes beyond the source text in imagining a tragic fate for a character whose story was largely left untold in Chaucer’s version. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney made a new translation of The Testament of Cresseid in 2009.

Henryson is also credited with twelve short works that include Robene and Makyne and The Abbay Walk (about Dunfermline Abbey), however it is difficult to date these and there is much debate over the point in Henryson’s life when these poems were written.

Henryson is an important figure in Scottish literary history and his contribution to Scotland’s literary canon is perhaps not as well-known or appreciated as that of Burns, although it certainly should be.

Robert Douglas is a memoirist and novelist, originally from Maryhill in Glasgow. He left school aged 15, and joined the boys’ service of the RAF following the death of his mother in 1954. In 1962 he became a prison officer in Birmingham, where had , Moors murderer Ian Brady and gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kay were under his care. In 1988 he wrote a story for the Bristol Evening Post about the last days of the death penalty in the UK; a neighbour encouraged him to continue to write.

Douglas Robert was 66 when his first volume of memoirs, Night Song of the Last Tram, was published in 2005. The first volume covered his childhood in Glasgow, and its sequel, Somewhere to Lay My Head, discussed his time in the RAF. The final volume in the series, At Her Majesty’s Pleasure, covered his work as a prison officer. After his memoirs were published, Douglas turned to fiction with the novels Whose Turn for the Stairs? and Staying On Past the Terminus, set in a fictional Glasgow tenement in Maryhill.

He retired in 1995, intending to paint, and instead wrote his memoirs and novels. He lives in Corbridge near Hexham with his second wife Patricia, and has two adult children.

Robert Dodds was born in England and grew up in Yorkshire and Kent with his parents, a neurotic dog, and a tortoise. He went to Oxford University to study English and play golf, and then became a teacher. After a few years working in England, Mexico, and the USA, he settled in Edinburgh. By this time he was a filmmaker as well as a teacher, and he set up a new degree course in film and television production at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1980s. He still works at Edinburgh College of Art for part of the year.

Robert Dodds has written four children’s novels, all published by Andersen Press. They are The Midnight Clowns, Nightland, The Secret of Iguando, and The Murrian. These are tense supernatural thrillers, and feature the same main characters – Claire Swift and her brother Ben. For adults, he has written a collection of short stories published by Polygon, Rattlesnake and Other Tales, and has had a number of stories broadcast on BBC radio.

Robert Davidson is a writer and editor based in Highland Scotland. Originally a civil engineer, mostly working in the water industry, he later became an editor and publisher. He has written and co-written a number of books, including the poetry collections The Bird & The Monkey and Total Immersion. He was Managing Editor of Northwords Magazine and, later, the online magazine Sandstone Review.

He has co-written books such as the Saltire shortlisted Shadow Behind the Sun and the Boardman Tasker shortlisted Cairngorm John. Robert Davidson’s first novel is Site Works, was published by Sandstone Press in 2011.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham – known as the Gaucho Laird and nicknamed Don Roberto – was a Scottish politician, writer, journalist and businessman. Although born in London to parents Major William Bontine and Elizabeth Elphinstone-Fleeming, he was raised in Renfewshire and Dunbartonshire. He was schooled at Harrow in England, and later studied in Brussels before moving to Argentina to make his fortune in cattle ranching. This was not entirely a success, and he was even kidnapped by rebels.

In 1879 he married the French/Chilean poet Gabriela de la Balmondiere, after some time in Mexico and Texas, he returned to Scotland in 1883 following the death of his father. In the UK he became interested in politics and was the first Socialist Member of Parliament, although he was elected as a Liberal Party candidate. He was also the first MP to be suspended from the House of Commons for swearing, using the word damn on an attack on the House of Lords in 1887.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries he wrote a number of books, from short stories, biographies, history and travel books, particularly on South American subjects.

Graham also wrote on a number of political subjects, increasingly radical and liberal, and co-founded the Scottish Labour Party with Keir Hardie. In 1892 he stood in the general election as a Labour candidate, but was defeated. A strong supporter of Scottish independence, and helped establish the Scottish Home Rule Association. In 1934, two years before his death, he was the first president of the Scottish National Party.

Robert Cunninghame Graham died in 1936 in Buenos Airies, Argentina, while visiting friends. His body lady in state at the Casa del Teatro, and was later returned to Scotland and buried at Inchamhome Priory at the Lake of Menteith. A monument to Graham was erected at Castlehill near the family home in Ardoch.

Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews University, where he has taught since 1989. Originally from Lanarkshire, Crawford was educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities, and has been writing since 1987. A founder editor of the magazine Verse, he is also a founding Fellow of the English Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

He has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards, and an Eric Gregory award in 1988. He has written numerous critical works on TS Eliot, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn and other poets, as well his own collections of poetry – the first of which, A Scottish Assembly, was published in 1990. He has also edited anthologies, such as The Book of St Andrews and, most recently, Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature.

His most recent book is history of pioneering Scottish photographers, The Beginning and the End of the World.