THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Nigel Tranter was born in Glasgow, but schooled at George Heriot’s in Edinburgh. His childhood interests included history and architecture, but his first profession was an account for his uncle’s insurance company. He married Jean Campbell Grieve in 1933, and his first book was published a year later – The Fortalices and Early Mansions of Southern Scotland, which he illustrated himself He turned to fiction, and became a full-time writer in 1936.

During WWII he served in the Royal Artillery, but still found time to write five books. After the war, he returned to writing, producing childrens’ books, romantic novels, and Westerns under the pen-name Nye Tredgold. But Tranter is most famous for his historical novels, particularly the Robert the Bruce trilogy written in between 1969 and 1971. The first of his historical novels was The Queen’s Grace, about Mary Queen of Scots, and was inspired in part by his research into the architectural history of Scottish Castles.

Later novels featured many more Scottish figures, including Kings James II, V and II, Queen Margaret, Macbeth, King David I, the House of Stewart, and others.

Tranter also wrote a number of non-fiction books, particularly on Scottish architecture such as the five-volume The Fortified House in Scotland. He was an active public speaker, particularly on historical and political subjects, and was a firm Scottish Nationalist.

Nigel Tranter died in 2000, aged 91, from the flu. In all, he wrote over 130 books; his final novel, Hope Endures, wasn’t published until 2004.

Nicola Morgan studied Classics and Philosophy at Cambridge University, before becoming an English teacher at a small school. Working with children with dyslexia and other reading and writing difficulties inspired her to set up Magic Readers, a pre-school scheme to encourage parents and children to enjoy reading activities together. By 1999, the success of Magic Readers led to the development of the Child Literacy Centre website, and the success of her early learning books enabled her to leave teaching and write full-time.

She has written over 50 early learning books, including several Thomas the Tank Engine stories, and many of her children’s non-fiction books remain best-sellers. But she always wanted to write fiction and her first – and favourite – novel, Mondays are Red, was published in 2002. Morgan also writes non-fiction, notably Blame My Brain, a guide for parents and their children to understanding the teenage brain. Blame My Brain was nominated for the Royal Society’s Aventis Junior Prize for Science Books.

Nicola lives in Edinburgh and London.

Nicolae Klepper is a Romanian-born American author who now lives and works in Edinburgh. He was born in Bucharest, but moved to the New York when he was just twelve years old. He studied Engineering and Business at the University of Denver, and for many years worked as a corporate executive and lived in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

His lifelong interest in cookery, and a desire to promote the culture of his native country, lead to his first book Taste of Romania: It’s Cookery and Glimpses of its History, Folklore, Art, Literature and Poetry. Klepper’s second book Romania: an Illustrated History was published in the USA in 2002, and in 2011 he published his first novel, The Geneva Affair, a psychological suspense novel inspired by his corporate experiences.

Nicolae Klepper now lives in Edinburgh with his Scottish wife Ann. He has four children and four grandchildren.

Nick Brooks was born and still lives in Glasgow. He achieved a First Class Honours Degree in English from Glasgow University, where he also graduated from the M.Litt in Creative Writing.

He has worked in a variety of jobs, including musician, cartoonist and stained glass window maker.

Nick has written two novels. His first, My Name is Denise Forrester, was published by Phoenix Press in 2005 and his second, The Good Death, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2006.

Neil Munro is best known for his ‘Para Handy’ stories these days but his writing career encompassed journalism, poetry and criticism, as well as his novels, making him one of the most visible literary figures of his time. His books fell out of fashion for a while but reprints of his work in the early 1990s and the appearance of a biography has brought him to the attention of a new audience.

Born in Inveraray in Argyll, in 1863, he came from a family of Gaelic speakers and though the language was beginning to lose its currency in that part of Scotland and Munro wrote in English, its influence can be felt strongly in his writing.

He began his career as a journalist on newspapers in the Glasgow area. After the publication of a short story collection, followed by two or three novels, he cut back on the journalism to concentrate on his writing. The appearance of a new character, Para Handy, in a short story in 1905 introduced a new comic strain in his work and the three collections of Para Handy stories (including The Vital Spark) were immediately successful. They transferred to the small screen in two separate sitcom series with the eponymous hero played by Duncan Macrae in the 1950s/60s and Gregor Fisher in the 1990s.

Munro returned to journalism during the First World War, becoming editor of a Glasgow evening paper in 1918. He died in Helensburgh in 1930.

Neil Miller Gunn was a novelist, critic and dramatist working at the height of the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike his contemporaries Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Gunn choose to write largely in English. Born in the Caithness village of Dunbeath, Gunn worked in the Civil Service in London and Edinburgh before returning to the live and work in the Highlands. He married his wife Daisy Frew in 1921.

Gunn’s first novel, The Grey Coast, was published in 1926, but it wasn’t until 1937 and the success of Highland River, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, that he was able to give up his job with Customs and Excise to write full-time. Highland River marked the end of a trilogy of novels exploring the history of the Highlands, following Sun Circle and Butcher’s Broom. The following year Gunn sold his house in Inverness and bought a twenty-seven foot motor boat, The Thistle, and took his wife and brother on a three-month sailing cruise around the islands of Scotland.

Neil Gunn’s socialist and Scottish Nationalist politics shaped his work, but equally did the landscape and people of the northern Highlands in which he lived. His best known novels include The Silver Darlings, and Butcher’s Broom.

His final book was the autobiography The Atom of Delight, published in 1956. He wrote a number of essays, which have been collected into anthologies. Gunn died in 1973, and a memorial sculpture was unveiled at Dunbeath Harbour in 1991.

On 1 April 2014 Creative Scotland announced that composer Mike Vass was awarded funding to complete a commissioned piece celebrating the work of Neil Gunn. Vass is currently making his way along the route that Gunn chronicled in 1937 with a series of community concerts forming part of the project. A tour of the commissioned work will then take place in October 2014.

Nasim Marie Jafry was born in the west of Scotland in 1963 to a Scottish mother and a Pakistani father. She has an MA and a MSc from Glasgow University, but her studies were severely disrupted when she became ill with ME. She currently lives in Edinburgh. Her autobiographical novel The State of Me was published by HarperCollins in 2008. She has had stories published in various literary magazines and was shortlisted for The Bridport Short Story Award 2011.

Born Naomi Margaret Haldane in 1897 in Edinburgh, Naomi Mitchison was a Scottish novelist and poet who wrote over 90 books in a wide range of genres, from historical, children’s and science fiction. Her father, John Scott Haldane, was a physiologist. She was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, as well as at home by a governess. She started a science degree at Oxford University, but suspended her studies to become a VAD nurse during WWI. After catching scarlet fever, she returned to her studies.

Mitchison married barrister Gilbert Richard Mitchison in 1916, who later became an MP and then Lord. Together they had seven children, and lived in Carradale House on the Mull of Kintyre from 1939. Politically left wing, she stood as a Labour Party candidate in 1935, but was unsuccessful. She was a member of the Argyll County Council and later the Highland and Island Advisory Council. She was also a feminist, and wrote widely on issues of sex, birth control and rape.

She was a prolific writer, and her first novel was The Conquered, was published in 1923. Her most successful books include The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), Early in Orcadia (1987) and the controversial novel in We Have Been Warned, which was subject to censorship (1935). Many of her earlier novels were set in the classical era, and she also wrote historical Aurthurian fantasies such as To the Chapel Perilous (1955). She wrote a three-volume autobiography between 1973 and 1985. Naomi Mitchison travelled widely, and wrote about her travels and set some novels in Africa.

As a journalist, she wrote for newspapers and magazines such as The New Statesman and The Guardian.

In 1981 she was appointed a CBE. She never took the title Lady, despite being married to a life peer. Naomi Mitchison died in 1999, aged 101, at her house in Carradale. A biography of her, The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, was written by Jenni Calder.

Muriel Spark was the grande dame of Scottish letters. A prolific writer, she has produced over twenty novels as well as works of poetry, drama, biography, non-fiction and children’s stories.

Spark was born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated at James Gillespie’s School for Girls (said to be the inspiration for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her best known novel). She worked in a succession of jobs before marrying Sydney Spark in 1937. The couple had one son, Robin, and lived in Central Africa for a while. When the marriage ended, Spark moved to London.

Spark’s writing career began early on when she won a prize in school but she first came to the public’s attention when she won a short story competition in the Observer. Since then her work has attracted numerous awards including the James Tait Memorial Prize, the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award and the FNAC Prix Etranger. Her work has been recognised internationally: in 1978 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1988 to the L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Muriel Spark moved to Italy in 1967. Her long-awaited and much-acclaimed autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, appeared in 1992. In 1993 she was made Dame of the British Empire. Dame Spark died in her adopted home of Civitella della Chiana, in Tuscany, in 2006.

2018 in Scotland marks Spark100, which includes a diverse programme of events happening in various venues throughout the year.

Helen and Morna Mulgray are twin sisters from Edinburgh who live and write together. They were born ten minutes apart in Edinburgh, and both studied at the University of Edinburgh. Both also became teachers in Midlothian, though at separate schools.

Although they had tried to write romantic fiction in the 1980s, it wasn’t until 2007 that their first book, the quirky crime novel No Suspicious Circumstances, was published. The novels, which are often set in Scotland, feature undercover Customs investigator D.J. Smith and a trained sniffer-cat called Gorgonzola.

Their most recent novel, Suspects All!, is set in Madeira, a favourite holiday destination of the twins.

Prior to becoming a full-time author, Morag Joss’s professional life had assumed various forms, including time spent as an English tutor, proofreader, clothes designer, university lecturer and singer. She was born in England and moved to Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland at the age of four. She received an MA in English from the University of St. Andrews and went on to study singing at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

In 1996, Morag’s first short story was runner-up in a competition sponsored by Good Housekeeping magazine. Her first foray into novel writing began with the Sara Selkirk mystery series, the first of which was encouraged by PD James. In subsequent novels she has moved closer to literary fiction and no longer writes ‘whodunnits’ or mysteries. All her work has been published in the USA as well as Britain, and translated into several languages.

Morag Joss’s seventh novel, Among the Missing, is set in Scotland. Published in America in June 2011 to outstanding reviews, it was published in the UK in September 2011 with the title Across the Bridge.

Her first novel, Funeral Music, was shortlisted for the Dilys Award; her fourth novel, Half Broken Things, was winner of the 2003 Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award and adapted into a television film in 2007; and her sixth novel, The Night Following, was nominated for the Best Novel category of the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2009.

In 2008, she was a Heinrich Böll writer-in-residence on Achill Island in County Mayo, Ireland.

Morag currently lives in Hampshire, England.

Although she was born in the Scottish Borders, Moira McPartlin was raised in a small Fife mining village. After years working for Shell Oil, she turned to writing full-time in 2005. Her writing has been widely anthologised in collections including Northwords Now, Crannog and others, and she is a subeditor of The Scottish Mountaineer magazine.

Moira McPartlin’s first novel, The Incomers, was published in 2012, and is set in Fife during the 1960s. She is one of the main organisers of Weegie Wednesday, a Glasgow based literary networking group. I am also the Finance Convenor of the Federation of Writers Scotland and on the editorial board of New Voices Press, the chief imprint of the Federation of Writers Scotland.

McPartlin now lives in Stirlingshire with her husband. A keen hillwalker, she has ‘bagged’ all of Scotland’s Munros.

Born in 1966 and brought up in Dalkeith, Mike is now based in Edinburgh, after spending time living and working in the north west of England and south Wales.

Mike realised that writing and the creative process were what made him tick after doing a church-based course looking at gifts and passions. Previous work doing environmental projects with primary age children spurred him on to write for children.

His first book Catscape began as a single chapter submitted for a BBC Talent competition. It missed the final shortlist but a letter of encouragement was enough for Mike to work away to complete the story. The completed book won the Kelpies Prize in 2005. His second novel, Grimm, will be published in Autumn 2008.

Writing influences are mystery adventure stories that he loved as a child: The Three Investigators, Tintin and Dr Who. Mike squeezes his writing in between an almost full-time job managing a charity (Befriending Network Scotland) and looking after his two young sons.

Mike’s other creative exploits include taking part in a number of 24 Hour Film Challenges where a 6 minute film is written, filmed and produced in a day. The results are on YouTube.

Although poet Mick Imlah was born in Aberdeen, he was raised in Glasgow and later in Kent. He studied and then taught at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is now Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, having previously been editor of The Poetry Review.

As well as his own collections, including The Zoologist’s Bath, Birthmarks and most recently The Lost Leader – for which he won the 2008 Forward Prize for Poetry – Imlah has edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse with Robert Crawford, and has edited several collections for Faber & Faber.

Imlah died in January 2009, having been diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 2007.

Although born in The Hague in The Netherlands, and having lived in Australia since he was seven, Michel Faber has lived in Scotland since 1993 and is generally considered to be a Scottish author. He retains a Dutch passport, having rejected pleas to become a British citizen.

Faber studied Dutch, Philosophy, Rhetoric, English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1980. He later trained as a nurse. He has been writing since he was 14, but did not win success with his short stories until the 1990s. His first book, the short story collection, Some Rain Must Fall, was published in 1998. His first novel, Under the Skin, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel award, although early drafts of The Crimson Petal and the White pre-date this by nearly 20 years. Faber’s novels span time and space and cannot easily be categorised: from the Scottish Highlands of Under the Skin to the depths of Victorian London in his bestseller The Crimson Petal and the White, and most recently to contemporary Iraq in The Fire Gospel, part of Canongate’s Myths series.

He has won numerous Scottish literary prizes, including the Macallan Short Story Competition, The Neil Gunn Prize, and the Saltire First Book of the Year Award.

Faber now lives in the Scottish Highlands with his family. He reviews books for The Guardian and continues to write.

Although born in Leicester, science fiction and fantasy author Michael Cobley has lived most of his life in and around Glasgow. He attended Clydebank High School, and studied for a time at the University of Strathclyde. He was a DJ at the University’s student union for a number of years, and later stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate for several council elections.

His first published work was a short story, Waltz in Flexitime, which appeared in a 1988 science fiction anthology. Although known for SF, his first fantasy novel, Shadowkings, was published in 2000, followed by two others in 2003 and 2005. In 2009 he turned away from fantasy with a new space opera trilogy called Humanity’s Fire; the first book in the series is Seeds of Earth, which was followed by The Orphaned Worlds in 2010.

Michael Cannon had an unhappy schooling in the West of Scotland and left with a clutch of poor qualifications. He started a job as a trainee in the Tax Office in the civil service, a position that he found both boring and difficult.

At the age of twenty-two Cannon started work at Sullom Voe oil terminal in the Shetlands, in a job that saw him doing no less than sixty seven hours a week. Although well paid, it was a shift system that saw him working twenty-eight days on and seven days off, but he realised that without further education he would never be able to progress.

He decided to enrol at a further education college in order to gain the necessary qualifications to enter university. He then spent a summer working at a Kibbutz before returning to read English literature.

After graduating he secured a post at Strathclyde University where his role predominately involved negotiating intellectual property contracts. Although he still works at Strathclyde University (as a “liaison between academia and industry”) he claims that his three published works were written after hours.

The Borough was published in 1995 and A Conspiracy of Hope was in 1996, both by Serpents Tail. Cannon’s latest book, Lachlan’s War, was published in Autumn 2006 by Viking. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies of Scottish Short Fiction.

Journalist and author Meg Henderson was born in Glasgow, the youngest of three children. She lived is several parts of the city. When she was 11 her aunt Peggy died aged just 27 during childbirth, and her first book Finding Peggy was born out of her research into her family history.

Meg Henderson left school aged 16, having had to care for her family ever since the death of Peggy; her mother and alcoholic father being unable to cope with the loss. She first worked for the NHS, then travelled to India with the Voluntary Service Overseas. When she returned to Scotland she married and adopted her two children. She now lives with her husband on the East Coast of Scotland, and works as a journalist writing for newspapers and television. She says her first love has always been writing; her most recent novel is Ruby.

Henderson’s novels are generally set in pre-war and wartime Glasgow.

Gaelic poet and academic Meg Bateman was born and raised in Edinburgh, where she attended Mary Erskine’s school for girls. After school, she attended university in Bristol and Aberdeen, where she studied for a doctorate in Medieval Religious Poetry in Gaelic.

An academic, she has taught at Aberdeen University’s Celtic department and now teaches at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, the Gaelic College in Skye. She lives on Skye, on the Sleat peninsula.

She began writing poetry in Gaelic in her mid-twenties, and her first published collection, Òrain Ghaoil / Amhràin Ghrà came out in 1989, with poems in both Scots and Irish Gaelic. Her second collection, Aotromachd agus Dain Eile (Lightness and Other Poems) was published in 1997, and her third, Soirbheas – (Fair Wind) was shortlisted for a 2007 Saltire Society award. Bateman has also edited and translated two anthologies of Gaelic poetry, Gàir Nan Clàrsach (The Harps’ Cry) in 1993 and Duanaire na Sracaire: Anthology of Scotland’s Gaelic Verse to 1600, published in 2007.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Meaghan Delahunt has lived in Edinburgh for around 15 years and now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews.

While living in Australia, Delahunt dropped out of her University degree to join the Socialist Workers Party of Australia, and took a job at a General Motors car assembly line where she became a union leader and wrote for the SWP newspaper. After eight years she left the SWP, and in 1991 she left Australia to travel and live in South East Asia and India. Her first novel, In The Blue House, was published in 2001 and nominated for the Orange Prize, won the Saltire First Book Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Prize, and a regional Commonwealth Prize. Her second novel, The Red Book, is set in India 20 years after the Bhopal disaster.