THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Gordon Jarvie worked mostly in publishing. He has authored books on language (such as the Bloomsbury Grammar Guide); books for children (mainly co-authored with his wife Frances, in the NMS Scotties series); and is editor of various anthologies (including Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan). He has also done work on the Glasgow novelist George Friel. Nowadays, he is a poet, although there still seem to be prams in the hallway.

Possibly the best-known and most iconic writer from Scotland, Robert Burns continues to fascinate, centuries after his death. Due to the annual Burns Night celebrations, which take place on January 25th each year, the ‘ploughman poet’ (an expression that belied his education) is remembered fondly in Scotland, and in many other countries all over the world. The outline of his life and his passions for women, songs, and drink are well known and contribute in no small part to his popularity.

Born in Alloway, Ayrshire in 1759 into fairly humble circumstances, Robert received a certain amount of schooling and was well read for a boy of his background. He began his working life as an apprentice flax-dresser in Irvine, Ayrshire, but after his father died he worked the family farm along with his brother, Gilbert.

In 1786 he had published, in Kilmarnock, a first collection of poems: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which made him an overnight success. He went to Edinburgh where he was well received by the polite society of the day (though Burns’ personality did not always sit well with that world). Walter Scott, then a boy of fifteen, remembered him thus:

‘I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school; that is, none of your modern agriculturalists who keep laborers for their drudgery, but the douce guidman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments: the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a cast which glowed (I say literally glowed). I never saw such another eye in a human being, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty.’

As well as poetry, Burns is well known for his songs, and his contributions to George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice and James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum have perhaps contributed more to his ‘Immortal Memory’ around the world; the most famous being, ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’, ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ and of course, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, sung at Hogmanay.

He died in 1796 in Dumfries at the age of 37, his life foreshortened by drink and poor health, and leaving a widow, Jean Armour, and a large family.

Writer, poet and translator Robert Alan Jamieson was born in Lerwick and raised in Sandness. His stories and poems were first published in local magazines such as The New Shetlander and Shetland Life while he still a teenager. His first novel Soor Hearts was published in 1983, and has since published the following novels Thin Wealth, A Day in the Office, Da Happie Land and MacCloud Falls. His poetry collections include Shoormal, Nort Atlantik Drift, Ansin t’Sjaetlin and Plague Clothes.

Jamieson studied English at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1980s, during which time his first play was published. In 1993 he became co-editor of the Edinburgh Review, and was writer-in-residence at the William Soutar house in Perth. He was a tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh.

He lives in Edinburgh.

An innovative and prolific poet, Richard Price rose to prominence in 2005, when his first collection for Carcanet Press, Lucky Day, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A member of the Informationist group of poets in the 1990s – alongside Robert Crawford, Alan Riach and W. N. Herbert, among others – Price has been a founding member of magazines such as Gairfish, Southfields and Painted, spoken, as well as Vennel Press. His first novel, A Boy in Summer, was published in 2002. He is also a member of the London-based Poetry Workshop.

Though English born, within six weeks Richard Price had moved to Renfrewshire – the basis for the half-rural, half-urban landscape of Renfrewshwhere, in which his poems take place. He trained as a journalist at Napier College before studying English at the University of Strathclyde, and in 1994 completed a PhD on Modern Scottish Fiction, specifically the novels and plays of Neil M. Gunn.

Richard Price is currently Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, London. His latest collection, Rays, was published by Carcanet.

Richard F. Holloway is a writer and broadcaster, and was formerly the Scottish Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh. He has written numerous books on Christianity, faith and ethics, and was also Chair of the Scottish Arts Council.

Holloway was educated at Kelham Theological College, Edinburgh Theological College and the Union Theological Seminary in New York. From 1959 to 1986 he served as a curate, vicar and rector at various parishes in the UK and also in the USA, before becoming Bishop of Edinburgh in 1986. In 1992 he was elected Primus of the Scottish Episcopalian Church. He resigned in 2000, following the Lambeth Conference of 1998. An outspoken liberal, he campaigns on a number of human rights issues, including gay rights, and is a patron of LGBT Youth Scotland.

Richard Holloway frequently reviews books for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and other newspapers, and has hosted the BBC Radio Scotland book review programme Cover Stories. He has also appeared on television.

He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Jean, whom he met while studying in New York. They have three adult children. He was Gresham Professor of Divinity in the City of London four four years until 2001.

Richard Holloway formally launched BooksfromScotland.com at a party in December 2005.

Edinburgh-based author was born and raised in Switzerland. She studied English and German at Zurich University and the University of Aberdeen, before starting her Pd.D. in Zurich. In 1993 she moved to Edinburgh after meeting and marrying the Scottish poet Ron Butlin.

She first wrote in German, but switched to English when moving to Scotland. She is the winner of the Edinburgh Review Tenth Anniversary Short Story Competition; her works include the novel The Beauty Room and the short story collection Inside~Outside. Claire is a creative writing tutor at the National Galleries of Scotland. Her second collection, Fighting It, was published in June 2009, and she is currently working on a second novel.

Ray Banks’ first novel, The Big Blind, was published in America in 2004, but his first UK success came with Saturday’s Child, published by Polygon in 2006. Saturday’s Child introduces the character of PI Callum Innes, who returns in the short story Donkey Work and Banks’ third novel, Donkey Punch.

Ray Banks currently works in retail, but has been a wedding singer, a salesman, and a croupier (work which influenced The Big Blind). His short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, as well as articles for crime writing websites such as Allan Guthrie’s Noir Originals.

Banks currently lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with his wife Anastasia

Crime writer Quintin Jardine was born in Motherwell in 1945, and studied law at Glasgow University. A varied career followed, including as a journalist, a political information officer, and media relations consultant. He gradually turned to novel writing, and his first book, Skinner’s Rules, was published in 1993.

The Bob Skinner novels are set in Edinburgh, and feature deputy chief constable Bon Skinner, marketed as “Britain’s toughest cop”. There are 18 novels in the series, most recently Fatal Last Words. His second series of novels feature private detective turned Hollywood actor Oz Blackstone. The first of these novels was written under the pen name of Matthew Reid, but subsequent books used the Jardine name. Oz Blackstone died following the events of the novel For the Death of Me, and Jardine has continued the series but now features Oz’s ex-wife Primavera, and moved the setting to Spain.

In the Oz Blackstone novels, Oz occasionally appeared as an actor in fictional films based on the Bob Skinner novels.

He left Motherwell in 1968, and now shares his time between Gullane in East Lothian, and L’Escala on the Costa Brava in Spain. He is married to his second wife Eileen, and has four grown-up children. He is a supporter of Motherwell Football Club.

Philip Kerr was born and raised in Edinburgh, but moved to Northampton when he was 14. He studied Law at the University of Birmingham. He now lives in London with his wife, also a writer, and three children.

Although he studied law, his first career was in advertising copywriting. Later, he took up journalism and then novel writing. He has written thrillers for adults, including the acclaimed Bernard Gunther ‘Berlin Noir’ series, and writes children’s novels under the nom de plume ‘P.B. Kerr’, starting with The Children of the Lamp series.

Kerr says that he was spurred to write his first children’s novel in an effort to wean his son away from television and video games and on to books. There are now four seven in the series, which has been optioned by film-makers DreamWorks.

Peter May is a novelist, originally from Glasgow but now living and working in France. He started out as a journalist, studying at the Edinburgh College of Commerce, and winning the Fraser Award aged just 21 for his writing. He was named Scotland’s Young Journalist of the Year in 1973. He wrote for The Scotsman and the Glasgow Evening Times, before moving to the BBC to write full-time for television in 1978.

His first novel, The Reporter, was published in 1977, which he adapted for television as the 13-part series The Standard. He wrote a number of television dramas, and co-created the Gaelic language serial Machair. Peter May returned to novel writing with the China Thrillers series of novels; one of the books, Snakehead, won the Prix Intramuros prize in France in 2007. May is an honorary member of the Chinese Crime Writers Association.

A second series of novels, The Enzo Files, is set in France. May meticulously researches the background to his novels, regularly visiting China, and even setting himself up as a virtual private eye in Second Life to research the background to Virtually Dead. His latest series of novels, The Lewis Trilogy, is set on the Isle of Lewis, and begins with The Blackhouse, published in 2011. The novel has already won the 2010 Prix des Lecteurs in France.

Peter May is married to writer Janice Hally, and lives in South West France.

In his own words:

Life for Scotland’s top travel writer began a long way from the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, where several of his bestselling books are set. And his life took him on a uniquely winding and interesting career path long before he turned his hand to earning his daily bread by writing books.

Peter was born in the Morayshire fishing village of Lossiemouth, but since early childhood has lived (on and off!) in the pretty agricultural county of East Lothian. On leaving school, he surprised those who knew his free-spirited nature by turning down the opportunity to study at Edinburgh College of Art in favour of joining the Civil Service. But, perhaps predictably, after eighteen unfulfilling months as a rookie executive officer, Peter escaped the claustrophobic safety of government employment to become a professional jazz musician. From the steadfastly secure to the precipitously precarious! After blowing his meagre savings on a clapped-out Bedford Dormobile, the 19-year-old Peter (or Pete as he was known in jazz circles) piled his seven-piece Dixieland group into the old van and headed off with his trusty clarinet for a two-month engagement in Germany.

Music

He returned to London to join Scotland’s top jazz band, the Clyde Valley Stompers, eventually taking over leadership of the ‘Clydes’ and recording for the celebrated Beatles producer, George Martin.

Their swinging version of Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and The Wolf’ took the Stompers into the pop charts for the first time and launched them into a hurly-burly life of incessant touring, recording, broadcasting and regular network TV dates with such world-famous stars as Shirley Bassey, Morcambe and Wise, Brenda Lee, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and, ultimately, the Beatles. Concurrent film work involved the Clydes in playing the title music for the Norman Wisdom comedy romp, ‘On The Beat’, and in appearing with Tommy Steele in ‘It’s All Happening’

In the mid-sixties, Peter, now married and with a baby son, gave up this hectic lifestyle and returned to Scotland to embark on a career as a record producer in his own right.

Freelancing for several British and American labels, he went on to produce upwards of two hundred albums, working with such legendary Scottish names as Andy Stewart, Jimmy Shand, Alex Welsh and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. For the latter, he produced the international chart-topper ‘Amazing Grace’ – the biggest-selling instrumental ever, with worldwide sales of some thirteen million copies. His own musical experiences having started by learning to play the bagpipes when a young boy himself, the bagpipe-led ‘Amazing Grace’ seemed to see Peter’s life in music come full circle.

Farming

Since 1970, Peter, coming from a farming family, had been combining his recording work with running his own farm, specialising in growing malting barley and breeding beef cattle on a 50-acre holding near the market town of Haddington in East Lothian. The recession of the early ‘eighties, and its detrimental effect on the record business in particular, prompted Peter to sell up, albeit reluctantly, and to take his wife and two sons off to the Spanish island of Mallorca, where they bought a run-down orange farm and hurled themselves wholeheartedly into trying to make a living from a type of agriculture they knew absolutely nothing about! And it was this blissful ignorance that was to provide the material for the hugely successful humour-laced books that Peter now writes, finally having given up the plough for the pen.

Books

The first of these Mallorca-based books, Snowball Oranges, became an overnight bestseller when published in 2000, and in 2002 was awarded the bronze in its category at the prestigious American Book of The Year Awards in Los Angeles. Its sequel, Mañana, Mañana, followed suit by being shortlisted for the WH Smith British Travel Book of The Year Award in that same year. Peter changed the setting, if not the mood, of his next book, Thistle Soup, which is a nostalgic, poignant-though-whimsical, account of family life in rural Scotland. The popularity of these books is steadily spreading, with editions now published in several languages.

In his following two books, Viva Mallorca! and A Basketful of Snowflakes, Peter revisited the enchanting scenes and colourful characters he introduced in Snowball Oranges. From Paella to Porridge is the fifth and last in the series about his family’s Mallorcan adventures. With a shift to writing fiction, Peter also features the island in The Mallorca Connection, first in the ‘Bob Burns Investigates’ trilogy of tongue-in-cheek mysteries, which is completed by The Sporran Connection and The Cruise Connection. Meanwhile, Fiddler On The Make is a quirky town-meets-country caper set in rural Scotland, while The Gannet Has Landed takes us back to Mallorca for a rom-com adventure peppered with humour.

Song of the Eight Winds, published in 2012, is Peter’s first historical novel, and quite a departure in subject matter from all of his previous books, albeit that the scene is once again Mallorca. Based on the 13th Century Christian Reconquista of the island from the Moors, it is an action-packed epic in which, according to Historical Novel Review, ‘History comes to life through Kerr’s skill as a storyteller.’

Peter, his travels over (at least for the present!) is now happily settled back in East Lothian with his wife and two wee Border Terrier dogs.

Peter Dorward was born in St Andrews in 1963. Having been a hop-picker, an aid-worker in the Bolivian Andes, pub musician and a runner for a film crew, he now works as a GP and medical teacher in Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner Deborah and their two boys. Peter Dorward is a winner of the 2000 Canongate/Waterstone’s short story prize and the 1997 Fish short story competition. Nightingale, set in Bologna in 1980, is his first novel.

Peter Davidson was born in Scotland in 1957. He is currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Peter has edited Clarendon’s The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe (Vol I, 1998; II, 1999); the Clarendon anthology of seventeenth-century English poetry, Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 (1998), and (with Jane Stevenson) Early Modern Women’s Poetry: An Anthology (2001). He has also published numerous articles and studies of the post-reformation culture of British Catholicism, most recently in the monograph The Universal Baroque (Manchester University Press, 2007).

His latest book from Carcanet is Distance and Memory, published in 2013.

Peter Burnett was born of a farming family in 1968 and spent his early years in Memsie Aberdeenshire. He went to school in Aberdeen and graduated in Cultural History from the University of Aberdeen. He has worked in theatre and is a performing blues guitarist and singer. He currently works as a financial adviser which has financed a second degree course, in Theology, at Glasgow University. He has published several short stories and his first novel The Machine Doctor was shortlisted for Scottish Book of the Year 2002. Peter is also the author of Odium (2004), The Supper Book (2008) and The Studio Game (2012).

Paul Johnston was born in Edinburgh in 1957, the son of successful thriller writer Ronald Johnston. He attended Edinburgh’s prestigious Fettes college (which he blew up in his first novel), in part so that he could study ancient Greek. He went on to read ancient and modern Greek at the University of Oxford. After leaving University in 1982, he worked in the shipping industry for a few years, moving to Greece in 1987 to escape the rat-race. While in Greece, he worked as a journalist and part-time English teacher.

He starting writing in Greece, finishing two novels before his first was published, in 1997. Body Politic was a crime novel set in 21st-century Edinburgh, and won a CWA John-Creasey Memorial Dagger award. In the novel, Edinburgh is now an independent city-state run by a Council of City Guardians, a group of University Professors, who have imposed a low-crime, low-tech society ruthlessly supported by the City Guard.

Johnston has written five novels featuring Quint Dalrymple, the hero of Body Politic. In 2002 he shifted gears, moving from future Edinburgh to contemporary Greece with the Alex-Mavros series, starting with A Deeper Shade of Blue. In 1995 he moved to Edinburgh to work on a master’s degree in English, but he found the academic research too distracting from novel writing.

His most recent novel is the violent thriller Maps of Hell. Johnston regularly attends literary festivals, and shares his time between Scotland and Greece.

Orla Broderick is a single mother living with her daughter and dog on the beautiful Isle of Skye. She is Irish, originally from Co. Donegal but was raised in Co. Wicklow. She went to an all-girls Irish Catholic Boarding school, but was always in trouble with the nuns, so she learned to write as one way to escape.

Orla was first published in The Irish Times. She won The Hot Press short story competition. She has been published in Chroma and PenPusher and has read her work on BBC Radio Scotland.

Her talent has been developed thus far by Peter Urpeth of HI-Arts and Roger Hutchinson. Her tutors include Angus Dunn, Kevin MacNeil and Andrew Greig. Orla is the founder of The Skye Literary Salon. She has participated in and devised creative writing workshops. Her writing is poetic prose and is compared with the writings of Dylan Thomas.

HI-Arts Talent Development states she “is the one to watch in 2013” and she was a winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2014.

Poet Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh but shared his time between the capital and Assynt in Sutherland. Initially a primary school teacher, MacCaig later worked at Edinburgh and Stirling Universities reading creative writing and poetry. A conscientious objector during World War II, MacCaig remained a committed pacifist throughout his life.

Sharing his time between the city and the far north of Scotland influenced much of his poetry; the contrasts were for him complementary rather than contradictory. His first poetry collection, Far Cry, was published in 1943, the second, The Inward Eye, in 1955; both of these collections were classed as part of the ‘New Apocalypse’ movement. Later works were much more individual and hard to classify – which is probably how MacCaig liked it.

In 1975 MacCaig won the Cholmondeley Award, and in 1986 he won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His Collected Poems first appeared in 1985 and has been reissued several times, the last edition of which appeared in 2010.

Although his mother was a Gaelic speaker, Norman MacCaig only wrote in English. He died in Edinburgh in January 1996.

Nora Brown was born in Scotland and moved to London at the age of seventeen to study composing at the Royal Academy of Music. After graduating she worked for five years as an assistant for various high-profile individuals in the music industry, before moving to Durham to become a doctor. It was at medical school that she realized her dream of becoming a writer, and she returned to Scotland to pursue her writing career. In 2010 a trip to Rwanda gave Nora the inspiration for her novel, The Flower Plantation, and her passion for Africa. Having won the Lightship First Chapter Prize with her opening chapter, she completed Creative Writing Masters at BathSpa University. Nora lives near St Andrews in Scotland with her husband. The Flower Plantation is Nora’s first novel.

Nina de la Mer was born in East Kilbride, and studied Modern Languages at the University of Sussex. As part of her degree she spent a year in Hamburg, which inspired her debut novel 4 a.m. which is set in the British Army Base in Fallingbostel near Hamburg.

Nina de la Mer spent ten years selling translation rights for a variety of publishers, and wrote her first book The Modern Maiden’s Handbook in 2007. She has also written several non-fiction books under the pseudonym Gina McKinnon. She lives in Brighton with her husband and daughter, and works as a proofreader.

Nikki Magennis is a writer and artist. She writes dirty stories, love stories and even sometimes erotic stories.

She has lived in Scotland since she was three. She grew up in the north and grew older in Glasgow, failing art school and working as a gardener, strawberry picker, ticket seller, civil servant, carer, set painter and stage manager among various other things. Eventually she shut herself away in a very draughty attic flat on a small, cloudy island and started writing.

Author of two novels, Circus Excite and The New Rakes, many short stories, and editor of FeatherLit.com – an online zine for the literary erotic – she has recently published work in PANK, Gutter and Best Erotic Romance.