THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

John Aberdein is a writer, originally from Aberdeen, who won the Saltire First Book of the Year for his debut novel Amande’s Bed. Aberdein was born and raised in Aberdeen, and won a scholarship to Robert Gordon’s College. He first worked as a herring and scallop fisherman before becoming a teacher, and is also the first man to kayak around mainland Scotland.

He has stood for election several times, firstly for the Labour Party in 1987 and 1992, and then for the SSP in 2005. Politically on the left, he is now an active supporter of Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity party.

John Aberdein’s second novel, Strip the Willow, was published in 2009 and won the 2010 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Award for Fiction.

Joan Lingard is a name instantly recognisable to those interested in children’s books, although she also wrote for adults. Her career spanned five decades, with her most recent children’s book, Trouble on Cable Street, released by Catnip Publishing in  2014.

Joan Lingard was born in Scotland but the family moved to Belfast when she was two. She lived there till she was eighteen. Her debut novel, The Twelfth Day of July (Penguin), the first of the classic Kevin and Sadie series, is set in Belfast during the Troubles and was originally published in 1970. Across the Barricades, also part of the series, received the prestigious West German award, the Buxthuderbulle, in 1986. She moved back to Scotland and worked tirelessly for the industry, as part of Scottish PEN and through her many events with Scottish Book Trust.

Tug Of War has also enjoyed great success: shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal 1989, The Federation of Children’s Book Group Award 1989, it was runner-up in the Lancashire Children’s Book Club of the Year 1990 and shortlisted for the Sheffield Book Award. In 2009 Lingard won the Royal Mail Award for Scottish Children’s Books, in 1998 was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

Lingard comments that her work is often about displacement, of characters uprooting themselves, and facing up to new experiences.

Joan Lennon grew up in Canada and arrived in Scotland in 1978. After a year on a Hebridean island, she knew she’d come to the right place. She used to think she’d travelled quite a lot in her cool youth, but now that her children have started going off on fabulously exciting gap years to exotic places like China and Madagascar and Tanzania and South Africa and Borneo, she’s gone a bit quiet on that. She has had the mandatory quirky low-paid jobs – ice-cream sundae constructor, putz frau at the Munich Olympics, ballet-class pianist, a computer operator in the days when they needed a whole separate room …

These days, she divides her time between a husband, four sons, a cat, a collection of piano pupils – and writing. Her first big fat fantasy Questors was published in 2007. The Seventh Tide starts with the land- and seascape of the west coast of Scotland and then adds shape-shifters, soul-sucking kelpies, talking ferrets and an underwater Glasgow of the 24th century. A different landscape inspired The Wickit Chronicles – that of the vast swampy fens of medieval England. Ely Plot, Fen Gold, Ice Road and Witch Bell tell the adventures of the orphan Pip and the living, breathing, swimming stone gargoyle, Perfect. And for younger readers, there is the series Tales from the Keep, the first of which is titled The Ferret Princess, introducing a feisty heroine and a crowd of overexcited four-legged assistants.

Joan lives in Fife and has never reconsidered her decision all those years ago.

Born Joanne Rowling in a village near Bristol in 1965, J K Rowling surely needs no introduction. Her story has been told countless times on TV, newspapers and on the internet – the story of a struggling single mother, writing in an Edinburgh cafe; the story of countless rejections for her first book, Philosopher’s Stone, before it was eventually picked up by Bloomsbury; the story of a meteoric rise to celebrity; and the story of claims of plagiarism and theft, all unfounded.

Rowling studied French & Classics at Exeter University, and spent a year studying in Paris. After graduation, she worked in London for Amnesty International as a researcher. In 1990 she moved to Manchester to be with her then boyfriend, and it was on a delayed train from Manchester to London that the story of Harry Potter first came to her. Although she had been writing since she was six, she had never been published. In late 1990 her mother died of multiple sclerosis:

It was a terrible time. My father, Di and I were devastated; she was only forty five years old and we had never imagined – probably because we could not bear to contemplate the idea – that she could die so young. I remember feeling as though there was a paving slab pressing down upon my chest, a literal pain in my heart.

Following her mother’s death, and to get away for a while, she moved to Portugal and taught English. She married journalist Jorge Arantes, the father of her first child Jessica. They later divorced, and Rowling moved to Edinburgh in 1993. Three years later Bloomsbury agreed to publish Philosopher’s Stone. The final book in the Harry Potter series, The Deathly Hallows, was published in 2007.

JK Rowling married Dr Neil Murray in 2001, and they have two children together. She still lives in Edinburgh. She was awarded an OBE for services to children’s literature in 2001.

Rowling has said that Harry Potter was always intended to be a seven-novel series, and no further books are planned. Her first non-Potter novel, The Casual Vacancy, was published in 2012.

Jess Smith is a traditional storyteller from Perthshire. A Traveller, Jess’s chlldhood was spent travelling the length and breadth of Scotland in an old blue bus. Her three autobiographical books – Jessie’s Journey, Tales From The Tent and Tears for A Tinker – chart her life, from early childhood until the time she left the travelling life. The books are rich in stories – of ghosts and fairies, of childhood innocence and family sadness, all with a rich vein of humour. All three books have quickly become Scottish best-sellers.

The stories she tells have been handed down through generations of traveller’s tales, camp fire gatherings and family traditions. Jess is now a professional storyteller, and runs workshops, gatherings, concerts and fora, and is a member of the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

Jess’s first novel was Braur’s Rest, and has also written a short story collection called Sookin’ Berries.

Born Jessie Grant Macdonald in an Inverness workhouse in 1916, Jessie Kesson was a novelist and playwright most famous for her first novel, the semi-autobiographical The White Bird Passes. She was raised in an orphanage from the age of eight, finally leaving in 1932 to go into service. However, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to recuperate near Loch Ness, where she met her future husband, Johnnie Kesson.

In the 1930s and ’40s Kesson contributed to The Scots Magazine, and wrote over 30 features and plays for the BBC. In 1947 she moved to London to further her writing, supporting herself with a variety of odd jobs. Her heart, however, remained in Morayshire and Aberdeenshire. In the 1980s she was awarded honorary degrees from Dundee and Aberdeen Universities. She died in London in 1994.

Jessica Brockmole spent several years living in Scotland, where she knew too well the challenges in maintaining a relationship from a distance. She plotted her first novel, Letters from Skye on a long drive from the Isle of Skye to Edinburgh. She now lives in Indiana with her husband and two children.

Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous Sunday Times bestselling novels and has won various awards for her writing, including the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the RNA Romantic Comedy Novel of the Year Award. Her books have sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide and in 2015 she was inducted into the Love Stories Hall of Fame. Originally from Prestwick, Jenny is married with three children and divides her time between a castle in Fife and a flat in Edinburgh’s New Town. In November 2021, her book about an Edinburgh bookshop, The Christmas Bookshop, became her first book to go into The New York Times bestseller list.

For more about Jenny, visit her website and her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter  @jennycolgan and Instagram @jennycolganbooks

Writer and publisher Jennifer Doherty was born in Lanarkshire, but regularly visited the Scottish Borders as a child, and now lives in Eyemouth and Glasgow. She studied at Glasgow University, and moved to London in 1982. A number of business and management jobs followed, before she moved into freelance writing, editing and training. She took a Master’s degree from Birkbeck College during this time.

Her writing is informed by specific locations, setting magical stories in real places in Scotland and North Northumberland. She has an ongoing interest in how representation of place affects children, and enjoys reading her work in schools.

Her publishing company, Serafina Press, was launched in 2006 as a spin-off business from her gallery, The Smokehouse, in Eyemouth in the Borders. She sees liaising with illustrators and editing for other authors as part of her creative work, and has been delighted to give several young illustrators the chance to produce their first book.

Jennifer T. Doherty’s most recent title is The Sea Unicorn of Mull, 2017, reflecting her recent time in the West of Scotland.

In her own words:

I am an author, and poet, currently based in Portobello — a seaside town in Edinburgh. I spend most of my time writing, being a Mum, drawing snails, researching, finishing my theses, drinking wine, taking photographs, sculpting things from metal and most recently — making wallpaper from burlesque prints, or old 1970s books of flowers or birds.

Jenni’s debut novel The Panopticon was published by William Heinemann, at Random House. It was chosen to be part of the Waterstones 11 — a list of the best worldwide debut novels of 2012. It is now to be made into a movie with Ken Loach as Executive Producer. Jenni’s second novel The Sunlight Pilgrims was published by William Heinemann and her poetry collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia was published by Polygon.

In 2013 Jenni appeared on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list.

Jenni has published two collections of poetry. Urchin Belle and The Dead Queen of Bohemia are available from Blackheath Books. Poems featured in these collections were nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She has also won awards from Scottish Screen, Peggy Ramsay, Scottish Arts, Dewar Arts and Arts Council England.

An author of many talents Jenni is also an artist. The Scolds Bridle is a large sculpture built out of sheets of steel. On completing the sculpture several months were spent engraving this sculpture with words written by women in prison in the UK and US. The Scolds Bridle aims to raise awareness of issues facing women within prison and young offenders systems. It was exhibited in Greenwich Gallery, London. In July 2016 she won the Best Author award at The Herald’s Scottish Culture Awards.

Scottish literary historian and novelist Jenni Calder was born in Chicago, but has lived and worked in Scotland since 1971. Schooled in both the US and the UK, she married Scottish critic Angus Calder after meeting in Cambridge. She is the daughter of literary historian David Daiches.

Her own writing includes literary criticism of Walter Scott, RL Stevenson, and others, and her acclaimed biography of RLS, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study, was published in 1980. She has edited a number of poetry anthologies, and has written a series of books on the Scottish diaspora, such as Scots in Canada and Scots in the USA.

Calder has held numerous positions in Scotland, including Head of Publications at the National Museums of Scotland, and is currently president of Scottish PEN. Her most recent works include an autobiography, Not Nebuchandezzar, and Frontier Scots.

At the unprecedented young age of 30, Shetland-based poet Jen Hadfield was brought to national attention when her collection Nigh-No-Place won the 2008 T.S. Eliot prize.

Born in Cheshire, Jen Hadfield studied at Edinburgh University before undertaking an MLitt in Creative Writing with Glasgow University. Acclaimed for her close connection with the natural world, Hadfield’s poetry is concerned with notions of travel, wilderness and home. Her first collection, Almanacs, was published in 2005 by Bloodaxe Books and went on to win an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. This award enabled the poet to travel in Canada, which, along with her subsequent relocation to Shetland, proved a strong influence in the writing of Nigh-No-Place.

Hadfield lives and works on Shetland, as a poet, writing tutor, artist and sometime shop assistant. She recently received a Dewar Award to produce a solo exhibition of Shetland ex-votos in the style of sacred Mexican folk art, incorporating very short fiction. She is currently working on her first novel, to be set on the west coast of Canada in the 1920s.

Jeff Torrington wrote just two novels, but his first, (Swing Hammer Swing! won the Whitbread award in 1992 and influenced a generation of Scottish writers. Torrington was born in the Gorbals in Glasgow in 1935. As a boy he caught tuberculosis, and had to leave school to recuperate, and to read.

A variety of jobs followed, including film projectionist, postal worker and railway fireman, before joining the Linwood car factory. After he was made redundant in 1980 he joined the writers’ group at Paisley Central Library where he met and was encouraged to write by James Kelman. Many of his short stories were published in newspapers and magazines. It is said that Swing Hammer Swing! took thirty years to write, with many redrafts, before its eventual publication in 1992. The book was later turned into a play by the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre.

Torrington’s experiences at the Linwood factory were fictionalised in the novel The Devil’s Carousel, published in 1998.

He died in Paisley in 2008 from Parkinson’s Disease, while he was working on a third novel, Go Down Laughing.

Jeff Fallow is an a graphic designer and illustrator. He lives and works in Fife with his wife and son. His hobbies include taxidermy and creating steampunk sculpture. He has had a number of historical comic books published, such as Revolting Scotland, which was revised and extended as Old Scotland, New Scotland, and children’s book Scotland the Grave.

Janis Mackay is a writer, storyteller and voice teacher from Edinburgh. She studied journalism in London, but aged just 21 she realised that it was the wrong job for her, and took time to travel to France, Israel, Greece and other countries. After After returning to Scotland she studied speech and drama, becoming a teacher and voice coach. After many years she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University. An SAC writer-in-residence took her to Caithness, where she wrote the novel that became her Kelpies-prize winning Magnus Fin and the Ocean Quest in 2009.

Her children’s novels feature Magnus Fin, a young boy who is part human, part selkie – a mythical sea creature. Her latest novel, Magnus Fin and the Selkie Secret, is published by Floris books.

Janice Galloway scored an immediate success – and critical acclaim – with her début novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing. The story of a young drama teacher’s descent into insanity in a working-class housing estate sets the hard-hitting and confrontational tone central to her later short story collections and novels. The collections Blood and Where You Find It won the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. More recently she has turned her pen to strong historical women, with an opera based on the life of Mary Shelley (Monster, with Sally Beamish), and Clara, based on the life of 19th-century pianist Clara Weick Schumann.

Janice Galloway studied Music and English at Glasgow University, and now lives and works in Glasgow. Her memoir of her Ayrshire childhood in the 1950s and 60s, This Is Not About Me, was published in September 2008. An anthology of her earlier short stories, Collected Stories, was published in late 2009. Her latest collection is Jellyfish, published by Freight Books.

Prolific children’s author Janey Louise Jones is from Edinburgh, and read at Edinburgh University and later studied teaching at Moray House. With her husband she set up a successful chain of children’s activity centres in Scotland called The Jelly Club.

She illustrated and published her first two Princess Poppy books Princess Poppy’s Party and Saffron’s Wedding herself, before Random House Children’s Books bought the series. There are now 25 Princes Poppy picture books, plus 15 additional novels, and various gift book editions have also been published. Her newest series is for older readers, starting with Dancing and Deception, and in 2010 she started the Cloudberry Castle series of ballet themed books with publishers Floris.

Jones still lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children.

Janet Paisley was born in Essex but raised in Avonbridge in central Scotland. She was a school teacher, but has been a writer, poet, and playwright since 1979. Paisley has won several Scottish Arts Council Bursaries and Fellowships, including to write Not for Glory, a series of linked short stories set near Falkirk. She writes in both English and Scots.

Paisley has been a scriptwriter for Scottish soap operas High Road and River City. Her 2001 short film Long Haul received a Bafta nomination.

White Rose Rebel is first full-length novel.

Belfast-born Jane Harris was raised in Glasgow, but currently lives in London with her husband. A graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing course, she was writer-in-residence at Durham Prison before writing her début novel, The Observations. The historical novel set in 19th century central Scotland was subject to a bidding war between three publishers; Faber and Faber eventually won. The Observations was shortlisted for the 2006 Saltire Society Book of the Year awards.

Harris is also the writer of two Bafta-nominated short film scripts. Her second novel, Gillespie and I, was published by Faber in 2011.

Elizabeth Jane Cameron was born in Renton in West Dunbartonshire in 1910, and wrote novels under the pseudonym Jane Duncan. She is best known for her My Friends series of books, but also wrote other novels and some children’s books.

She spent much of her childhood at her grandparents’ croft in the Black Isle; the croft was fictionalised as Reachfar in her novels. Duncan studied English at the University of Glasgow. During the Second World War she worked as an intelligence officer in the RAF, and after the war she lived in Jamaica, returning to Scotland in 1958. Her first novels were written while she was living in Jamaica, the first of which, My Friends the Miss Boyds, was published in 1959. The My Friends novels were narrated by the character of Janet Sandison – a name used as a pseudonym for herself for some of her other novels. Duncan also wrote an autobiography, Letter from Reachfar, which explored the relationship between her fiction and her real life.

Duncan’s children’s novels featured the Cameron family, and like her other novels were semi-autobiographical in nature.

Jane Duncan died in 1976, and is buried in Kirkmichael graveyard.