THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Eddie Gibbons was born in Huyton, Liverpool, but has been living and working in Aberdeen since 1981. An engineering draughtsman by trade, he is also a poet with four published collections. His first collection Stations of the Heart was published in 1999, when he was aged fifty. In 2008, he was a runner up in the inaugural Edwin Morgan Poetry Collection with his poem Henri Rousseau Meets Frank O’Hara. Football features prominently in his work – his third collection, Game On!, is inspired by the sport – and he is a member of the Football Poets website.

Eddie Gibbons is a founder member of the Lemon Tree Writers’ Group in Aberdeen. His latest collection What They Say About You was published in 2010.

Duncan McLean was born in Aberdeenshire in 1964. He forms part of that influential bunch of then youngish writers who dominated the Scottish writing scene of the Nineties such as Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, James Meek, A L Kennedy, Laura Hird, and Gordon Legge.

While a student at Edinburgh University, McLean started writing for the Merry Mac Fun Co., a theatre company who were well known performers at the Edinburgh Fringe.

During the early part of the Nineties, he worked in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh, where he edited a magazine and ran a small press, Clocktower Press. Ahead of Its Time: A Clocktower Press anthology was published in 1998, and although there is perhaps no claim to being part of a literary movement, the anthology, along with Edinburgh’s Polygon publishers and subsequently, Canongate and Rebel Inc, champions a particular writing style. The London publisher, Jonathan Cape, went on to publish at least half of the writers from that era.

McLean’s first short story collection was Bucket of Tongues, followed by the novels, Blackden, and Bunker Man, and then the non-fiction title, Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. He is also a playwright with the collection of plays entitled, Rug Comes to Shuv, appearing in 1999. His plays have been performed at various theatres, including the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. His most recent play, Aalst, a disturbing drama drawn from real-life about a couple who murder their children, is also published by Methuen.

In the early Nineties, Duncan McLean moved to Orkney where he now divides his time between writing and working in his wife’s family business.

The poet, editor, printer and designer Duncan Glen was born in Cambuslang in 1933. He is best known for his championing of the life and work of Hugh MacDiarmid, and for his publishing imprint Akros.

Duncan Glen went to Rutherglen School but left aged just 15 to take up an apprenticeship in print composition. In 1954 he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Edinburgh College of Art. After completing national service with the RAF he became a typographic designer with the HMSO, and a freelance designer for publishers in London.

He founded Akros Publications in 1965 to publish Scottish poetry and literary criticism, including his own poetry and essays. During this time he lectured in design, eventually becoming Emeritus Professor of Visual Communication at Nottingham Trent University.

In 1977 he was elected Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers, and won Scottish Arts Council awards in 1974 and 1998. In 2008 he was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by Paisley University.

Duncan Glen died in 2008, and was survived by his wife Margaret and their two children.

Douglas Lindsay is a crime writer from Lanarkshire. After studying at the University of Glasgow, he moved to Belgium to work in NATO. It was there that he met his wife Kathryn, and they moved to Senegal to work for the British Foreign Office. While in Africa he started writing the stories that became his Barney Thomson series of novels, starting with The Long Midnight. A stand-alone novel, Lost in Juarez, was published in 2008. His most recent novels are only being published electronically.

Lindsay returned to the UK in 2000, and now lives in the south of England with this wife and two children.

Douglas Jackson was born in Jedburgh. He left school at the age of 15 to train as a journalist, first working for local newspapers and later for the Daily Record. He is now assistant editor of The Scotsman. He wrote Caligula, his debut novel set in ancient Rome, while commuting between Edinburgh and his Bridge of Allan home. Originally called The Emperor’s Elephant, his novel was discovered on the writers’ website YouWriteOn.com and a bidding war landed him a six-figure, two book deal.

Jackson’s second novel, Claudius, was published in mid 2009, and in 2010 he began a new Roman trilogy Hero of Rome. Douglas also writes under the pen-name of James Douglas.

Professor Douglas Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire in 1942, and is a multi-award winning author and poet. He first studied at the Scottish School of Librarianship in Glasgow, as well as working at the Akron Public Library, Ohio. On returning to Britain, he was accepted into Hull University, and it was during this time he published his first book Terry Street in 1969, whilst under the mentoring of Philip Larkin. The book was set in the area of Hull in which he then lived, and was widely acclaimed, winning both a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award.

Another award-winning title followed in 1974, when Love or Nothing was also awarded a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and later went on to win the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1976.

He moved back to Scotland in 1981, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the same year. Also in that year, he won the Hawthornden Prize for his book of poetry St. Kilda’s Parliament. In 1985, his book Elegies (written after the death of his first wife in 1981) was named the Whitbread Book of the Year.

More recent publications have included New Selected Poems, 1964-2000 as well as the collections he has edited, The Faber Book of Scottish Poetry (2006) and The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories (2001).

In addition to these publications he is a regular contributor to several publications including The Times Literary Supplement, and has written many radio and television plays.

In 1991, he accepted a professorship at the University of St. Andrews’ School of English, later becoming head of the school, and director of the Scottish Studies Institute. He is also credited with initiating the first creative writing course to have been taught at a Scottish university. He retires from his academic roles in 2008.

Doug Johnstone is a novelist based in Edinburgh. In 2021,The Big Chill, the second in his Skelfs series, was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. In 2020, A Dark Matter, the first in the series, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the Capital Crime Amazon Publishing Independent Voice Book of the Year award. Several of his books have been bestsellers and award winners, and his work has been praised by the likes of Val McDermid, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions, and has been an arts journalist for twenty years. Doug is a songwriter and musician with five albums and three EPs released, and he plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. He’s also player-manager of the Scotland Writers Football Club.

Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a Scottish author of light romantic novels, many of which were set in the Scottish Borders. She was born in Edinburgh in 1892, the daughter of the civil engineer David Alan Stevenson, the cousin of author Robert Louis Stevenson. Her first poetry collection was published in 1915. A year later she married Captain James Reid Peploe, and had four children. Her first novel, Peter West, was published in 1923, and she wrote over 40 novels in total. Her Mrs. Tim series of novels were based on her own experiences as a wife of an army officer.

Two of her novels were republished in 2008, and in 2011 two previously unpublished manuscripts were discovered by her granddaughter in an attic. She was famous for the links between her novels, as many important characters in one novel would reappear in minor or supporting roles in other books.

She was known as DES to her fans, and the fans themselves are known as DESsies. Stevenson and her husband moved to Moffat during the second world war, where she became an active member of the local community, and was a keen golfer. She died in the town in 1973.

Dorothy Dunnett, one of Scotland’s best-known and popular writers, was born Dorothy Halliday in Dunfermline, Fife, in 1923. Educated in Edinburgh (at the same school as Muriel Spark, their times there overlapping slightly) she began her writing career in the 1950s and was a prolific writer until her death in 2001.

Most of Dorothy Dunnett’s output was historical fiction: The Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo, but she also wrote an espionage series under her maiden name, which starred ‘Johnson Johnson’ and his yacht, ‘Dolly’.

She lived most of her life in Edinburgh where she was immersed in the cultural life of the capital and served on various boards and committees. Dunnett was awarded an OBE in 1992 for her services to literature.

Born in Dundee, Don Paterson is an accomplished poet, author and playwright, as well as a jazz guitarist.

He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990; in 1993, his poem, ‘A Private Bottling’ won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition. Paterson’s first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. God’s Gift to Women (1997), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scottish Award in 2002 and in 2003 his latest collection of poetry, Landing Light, won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award.

His plays include ‘The Land of Cakes’ and ‘A’body’s Aberdee’.

Don Paterson is the poetry editor for the London publishers, Picador, and writes reviews for several national newspapers. He still plays guitar solo and with the jazz-folk ensemble, Lammas. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Donald Smith is Director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, a post he has held since 2001 when the organisation was launched. Prior to his, he had been director of the Netherbow Arts Centre.

Smith was born in Glasgow, but was a “son of the Manse” and lived in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling; he spent his summers in Northern Ireland, which helped awaken his appreciation of the Scots language after his very formal English-language upbringing. Smith studied English Literature and Classical Greek at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s; later, he took a PhD.

As a playwright, his first play, The Bothy, was produced in 1986; most recently Jekyll and Hyde: A Specimen for the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature project. His first novel, The English Spy, was published in 2007. His most recent books were both about Robert Burns – the novel Between Ourselves, and the biography God, The Poet and the Devil – both 2009.

Donald Smith is married with five children.

Des Dillon grew up in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire. He read English at Strathclyde University and started his working life as a teacher. He now writes for television, stage and radio, as well as his own collections of poems, short stories and novels.

His first book, Sniz, a collection of poetry, was published in 1994, and has since had eight novels and a poetry collection published. Dillon has also taught creative writing at the Arvon Foundation and was Writer in Residence in Castlemilk, between 1998 and 2000. Des Dillon is also a writer on BBC Scotland’s weekly soap opera River City.

His novel Me And Ma Gal was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award in 1995. The book was voted the winner of a World Book Day survey to find the book that revealed the most about contemporary Scotland. It was broadcast as a drama on BBC Radio 4 in 2004.

Des Dillon has won the Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary twice, in 1997 and 2000. His latest novel, An Experiment in Compassion, was published by Luath Press in 2011.

Dillon lives in the village of Garlieston in Galloway and describes the feeling of heading to the beach with his dogs everyday as being “like fabric softener for the brain, a place where he can truly unwind”.

Professor Derick S. Thomson, or Ruaraidh MacThòmais in his native Gaelic, was a poet, publisher and lexicographer from the Isle of Lewis. Born in 1921, he was schooled in Stornoway before studying at the Universities of Aberdeen, Cambridge and Bangor. After joining the RAF during WWII, he joined the University of Edinburgh as an assistant professor of Celtic in 1948. In 1963 he was became Professor of Celtic at Glasgow, a position he held until his retirement in 1991.

Thomson was a leading figure in Gaelic writing, both as a poet, and as an academic. He set up the Gairm publishing house and magazine after seeing the strength of the Welsh language movement, and lead the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic project with editor Kenneth MacDonald. He wrote a number of books on Gaelic poetry, including An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry, The Companion to Gaelic Poetry, and European Poetry in Gaelic.

His first collection of poetry, Far Road, was published in 1970. His move from the traditional lyrical forms of Gaelic poetry to more free-verse forms, tackling contemporary and urban issues, influenced a generation of Gaelic poets. His 1982 anthology Creachadh na Clàrsaich won a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award.

Derick Thomson was an Honorary President of the Scottish Poetry Library, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. In June 2007, he received an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. In the 1970s, he was Chairman of the SNP’s Gaelic Committee. He died in March 2012, aged 90.

Denise Mina was born in the new town of East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow. Her father was an engineer who rode the boom time in North Sea Oil exploration. The family moved twenty-one times in eighteen years to areas all round Europe, including London, Paris and The Hague.

Mina left school at sixteen and worked in a variety of low-paid jobs that included: meat factory worker, barmaid, kitchen porter and cook. She eventually settled in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients.

At twenty-one she passed exams and entered Glasgow University, where she studied Law. Following this she took on research for a PhD thesis in ‘The Ascription of Mental Illness to Female Offenders’, at Strathclyde University. She then taught Criminology and Criminal Law part-time.

Instead of studying, she wrote what would be her first novel, Garnethill – obviously not time wasted. Garnethill, which was published in 1998, won the Crime Writer’s Association John Creasy Dagger for the Best First Crime Novel in that year.

Mina writes in what is popularly known as the Tartan Noir style and her writing includes work on the comic, Hellblazer: Empathy is the Enemy, which is to be published as a graphic novel by Vertigo. She has also written her own graphic novel, A Sickness in the Family, about spree killing and property prices, to be published by DC Comics.

She also writes short stories for collections and stories for BBC Radio 4. She wrote her first play, ‘Ida Tamson’, which was performed at Oran Mor as part of the ‘A Play, a Pie and a Pint’ series, starring Elaine C. Smith.

Mina continues to write genre-bending, award-winning novels and in 2023 was asked by the Raymond Chandler estate to write a new Chandler novel, The Second Murderer.

Debi Gliori started writing children’s books in 1976, then attended art school in Edinburgh between 1979 and 1984. After winning a travelling scholoarship to visit Milan, she became a full-time freelance writer and illustrator. She is the author and illustrator of over 50 books, including the (Mr. Bear series, which won a Children’s Book Award. She also illustrates for other picture book writers. Gliori has also written the Pure Dead Magic series of novels for young adults.

Although born and raised in the West-end of Glasgow, Debi now lives near Edinburgh with her five children. Her studio is situated in a 13th-century herb garden.

D A (Dawn Ann) Nelson was born in Glasgow and grew up south of the city in the village of Neilston.

She started her career as a journalist on local newspapers, going on to work for some national newspapers before deciding journalism wasn’t for her and jumping ship into PR. Her first job as a press officer was for a political party and she’s also worked for a local authority and two West of Scotland Health Boards.

Writing fiction has always been something Dawn has done: as a young child, she wrote and illustrated her own little books. Dawn’s first novel, DarkIsle, is an exciting children’s fantasy set in the West of Scotland and ending up on the mythical island of Murst. The book was inspired by the dragon on Irvine Beach – a sculpture by artist Roy Fitzsimmons – and one that Dawn has always loved.

The novel has also caught the imagination of publishers worldwide, selling – along with its sequel – to major publishing houses in the USA, Germany, Italy, Spain, Korea and Japan.

Now living near Helensburgh with her husband and two small children, Dawn squeezes in time to write in between being a mum, chief cook and bottle washer and a part-time PR manager. She is currently working on the sequel to DarkIsle, which is due out in autumn 2008 and later on this year will start the third in the DarkIsle trilogy (due out next year).

Born John Reid on a farm at Rathen in Aberdeenshire, David Toulmin was a farm labourer from the age of 14 and throughout his adult life. He would write short stories and character sketches in the local Buchan dialect, and his stories were later featured in local newspapers. He wrote ten books, but the first of these was not published until he was 59 years old. Blown Seed was his only novel.

The Elphinstone Institute runs an annual short story competition in his name, and the University of Aberdeen awarded Toulmin an honorary MLitt in 1986. Toulmin died in Aberdeenshire in 1998.

David Robertson Ross was a historian and writer, often known as “the biker historian”. A passionate Scot, he wrote a number of historical tours of Scotland under the Luath Press series On The Trail of….

Born in Giffnock, he moved to East Kilbride aged just 5. He left school at 16, having been frustrated by the lack of Scottish history taught in his school. After reading the novels of Nigel Tranter, particularly The Bruce Trilogy, he vowed to travel Scotland and learn all he could about Scottish history.

A chance encounter at a lecture in Glasgow led him to write his first book, On The Trail of William Wallace, which was quickly followed by titles on other Scottish figures such as Robert the Bruce and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Ross regularly attended Scottish festivals and Highland Games across the globe, and now shared his time between East Kilbride and Ontario, Canada. He was convenor of the Society of William Wallace. His most recent book is a biography of ‘The Black Douglas’, James the Good. Ross died at home in January 2010, and his final book, Women of Scotland, was completed by his daughter and his publisher in November 2010.

David (Dave) Manderson was born in Westerton in Glasgow and attended Glasgow Academy in the city’s west end from 1966-73. From there he went to St Andrews University, where he met Alex Salmond and graduated with an MA in English Language and Literature. After university he worked in a variety of jobs, including shipping clerk and warehouse manager, before leaving the UK to go on the road as the roadie for the Scottish folk band, The Tannahill Weavers. Three years later he returned to the west of Scotland and started teaching.

In the late 1970s he began reading his fiction to audiences at small local venues such as The Scotia Bar and the Tchai Ovna café. He had already been hanging around places, mostly pubs, where he thought he could meet other writers. His first published story was in Northern Lights magazine in Aberdeen in 1980. From then on he published sporadically in small publications, including West Coast Magazine (1991), Gutter (Freight Books: 2011), The Living Tradition (1998), Ecloga (2005) Valve (Freight, 2011 and 2012), and in anthologies such as A Spiel Amang Us: The Scotia Writers’ Prize (Mainstream: 1990), Word Jig: New Writing from Scotland (Hanging Loose Press: 2003), and New Writing Scotland (ASLS: 2012 and 2013). He also helped hang the ‘Five Glasgow Artists’ exhibition (Alasdair Gray, Alasdair Taylor, John Connelly, Alan Fletcher and Carole Gibbons) at the McLellan Galleries in 1986.

In 1992 he founded the Real to Reel Short Film Festival which ran at the Glasgow Film Theatre for nine years, and in 2002 launched the creative writing magazine Nerve, which published early work by Louise Welsh, Zoe Strachan and Rachel Seiffert among others, editing it with Linda Jaxson and Brian Whittingham. It was supported by the Scottish Arts Council and ran for five issues. In 2004 he was awarded a New Writers Award by the same body. He ran the Reading Allowed poetry evenings at the Tchai Ovna Café in the West End for over a decade. After his MA in Creative Writing he went on to a Ph.D at Strathclyde University, writing a novel as his thesis, graduating in 2006 without being asked to make any changes at the viva. That novel, Lost Bodies, was published by Kennedy and Boyd in 2012 to a warm reception. It was the first time a creative work had been awarded a PhD in Scotland. In 2014 he co-authored a book with the director Eleanor Yule on ‘Scottish Miserabilism’ (Luath Press). In 2017 he won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust and spent a month at the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-Sur-Loing in north-central France. His study Scotnotes – Rob Roy (2009) and Local Hero (2010) – were published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in Glasgow University, as were journal articles by him on James Hogg, the Blackwood’s group and the film industry in the Trossachs. He also co-authored an academic article on creative writing and wayfaring. Meanwhile he was mentored by the novelist, playwright and short story writer Carl MacDougall.

In 2023, after three years independent research, he produced his monograph, The Anti-Hero’s Journey: the Life and Work of Alan Sharp (Peter Lang, Zurich). It was widely welcomed by the public and by academics and practitioners in the film/television industries, and culminated in an Alan Sharp season, From Greenock to Hollywood, at the Glasgow Film Theatre. The event was the first time the Greenock-born writer’s films had been shown in his native city for over fifty years. He is currently completing more work on Sharp and new fiction. He writes regular book reviews for the online magazine The Bottle Imp, news items for Byeline Scotland, and serves on the Board of Scottish PEN. He lives in Glasgow with his family. In 2025, he will take part in the Inverclyde Film Festival at another screening of Sharp’s films in the Waterfront Cinema in Greenock.

You can see a short animated film by Samantha Hendry of his poem Expedition here.

David Greig is as prolific playwright from Edinburgh. He was born in Edinburgh in 1969 but spent the first few years of his life living in Jos in Nigeria. He returned to Scotland aged twelve, and went to school at Stewart’s Melville College. He later studied drama at Bristol University, where he and some friends set up the Suspect Culture theatre company, which moved to Scotland later. His first play was produced in Glasgow in 1992, and he now writes around four or five plays a year.

As well as his own plays, Greig has written English-language versions of a number of major plays by Camus, Euripedes and others, and he also directed a number of plays. Greig has been commissioned to write for the Royal Court, the National Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His play Damascus was inspired by time he spent in the Middle East, working with the British Council in Syria.

David Greig is now living in Fife, where he has two children. His 2010 play Dunsinane, a sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was shortlisted for a Saltire Society Award.