THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Edinburgh-born David Donachie is a historical novelist with a particular interest in naval history in the 18th and 19th centuries. A former salesman, of everything from business machines to soap, he is now a full-time writer.

He also writes fiction under two pen names, Jack Ludlow and Tom Connery. His first series, The Privateersman Mysteries, is set in the late 18th century and features former navy Captain turned privateer Harry Ludlow. Writing as Jack Ludlow, his Republic series is set in ancient Rome and the Conquest Series is set in the 11th century.

He now lives with his wife, also an author, in Deal in Kent.

David Ashton was born in Greenock in 1961. After several years working for a bank, he studied at the Central Drama School in London in the mid 1960s and became an actor, appearing in theatre, film and television, including Doctor Who (three appearances), Monarch of the Glen and The Last King of Scotland. In the 1980s he started writing, firstly for radio and then later for television. Ashton won a Radio Times Drama award in 1985 for his play The Old Ladies at the Zoo.

His BBC radio series featuring Victorian Inspector McLevy has since been adapted by Ashton as novels, and are based on the real life James McLevy, an Irish Police Detective working in Leith in the 1830s who wrote his memoirs in the 1860s.

David Ashton now lives in London, where he continues to write and act.

Dave was born in Giffnock on the south side of Glasgow in 1951. He was one of four children. His mother is living in Fife, aged 92; his father, an office worker, died in 1975. Both parents grew up in the city of Glasgow. He can trace his family, on both sides, to the Glasgow area, back to the early 19th century.

He grew up in the village of Uplawmoor on the Renfrewshire/Ayrshire border. With a deep interest in nature from his childhood, he spent his early years exploring the woods and fields around his home – and in particular, fishing on Loch Libo.

Holidays in the Berwickshire fishing village of St Abbs and in Cowal visiting his grandmother and elderly aunts, helped add to what he sees now as an idyllic countryside upbringing.

Commuting to his secondary school education at Hutchesons’ Boys’ Grammar, in the centre of Glasgow, introduced him to city life – and a whole new set of accents and lifestyles.

A BA degree in Geography and Geology from Strathclyde University in 1972 was somehow obtained, despite a growing obsession with and involvement in folk music, particularly American country blues.

In 1973 Dave set off with the young woman who was to become his first wife, on the “Hippy Trail” to the East in a small van. Their adventures took them all over Europe, through the wilds of former Yugoslavia, all over mainland Greece and eventually into Turkey. Back home after a cold winter working in a factory in Amsterdam, Dave enrolled as a student for a second degree. This was an M.I.Biol in Ecology and Animal Behaviour, paid for by working as a laboratory technician at Paisley College of Technology and studying on “day release”

At the end of this time a chance encounter with the young Eddi Reader, lead to the formation of the folk and blues trio “Pigmeat” with his close friend Angus Aird. Immediate success on the folk circuit ensued and he turned professional musician. Inevitably, the highly talented and ambitious Edna moved on.

After answering an advertisement in the RSPB’s Birds magazine, Dave found himself employed as a contract surveyor working on the 1981 UK Peregrine survey in Argyll. This in turn lead to further golden eagle and barnacle goose monitoring contracts – in Perthshire, Argyll, Islay, Lewis and Harris before getting his first full time RSPB job, as the Scottish Species Protection and Investigations Officer in January 1984.

His first book Wildlife Crime is mainly about his work as an RSPB Investigations Officer, in the 1980s and 1990s.

He took early retirement from the RSPB at the end of 2006. He now lives in Dumfriesshire with his partner Eryl, where he plays the guitar, writes and walks the countryside. He is writing a novel and has become obsessed with fly fishing for trout.

Daniela Sacerdoti is an Italian-born schoolteacher and writer who has lived in Scotland for over ten years. She was born in Naples and raised in a small village in the Italian Alps, and she studied Classics at the University of Turin. Her great-uncle was the renowned Italian writer Carlo Levi.

Sacerdoti’s debut novel Watch Over Me was published in 2011 and has been very successful, receiving great reviews and impressive sales. Her children’s book The Really Weird Removal Company was a runner-up in the 2011 Kelpies Prize. It has since been published by Floris Books with the new title Really Weird Removals.com.

Daniela Sacerdoti now lives near Glasgow with her husband and two sons, and is continuing work on a trilogy of young adult novels called The Sarah Midnight Trilogy. The first novel in the series, Dreams was published in 2012 with Tide following in 2013.

Dane Love was born in Cumnock, Ayrshire. He was educated in the town, followed by Jordanhill College of Education in Glasgow, from where he graduated as a schoolteacher. He currently works as a Principal Teacher at Irvine Royal Academy.

Dane has had a long interest in Scottish, and in particular, local history. He has spent many hours travelling around the country, researching for his books. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, committee member of the Ayrshire Archaeological & Natural History Society, and Honorary Secretary of the Scottish Covenanter Memorials Associations.

Dane is married to Hazel, and they have two children, Dane (the third!) and Gillian.

With an interest in genealogy, he has traced his ancestry back to Robin Love, who fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at the battles of Culloden and Prestonpans.

Craig Russell has worked as a police officer, freelance writer and creative director.

His Fabel novels were inspired by his long-standing interest in the language, culture and people of Germany. The Lennox novels, set in 1950s Glasgow, were inspired by Russell’s fascination for the period and love of the unique character of the city.

His novels are translated into twenty-three languages worldwide.

In 2007, Craig Russell was awarded the highly prestigious Polizeistern (Police Star) by the Polizei Hamburg, the only non-German ever to receive this award. He was nominated for the 2007 CWA Duncan Lawrie Golden Dagger, the world’s biggest literary award for crime writers, as well as the SNCF Prix Polar in France. In 2008, Craig Russell won the CWA Dagger in the Library. In 2013, he was nominated for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger.

Craig Robertson is a journalist who has spent twenty years writing for the Sunday Post, a career which has seen him interview three Prime Ministers (and Susan Boyle), spent time on America’s Death Row, and covered major stories such as 9/11 and the Omagh bombing. He his now turned his hand to fiction with his gruesome debut novel Random, which was signed up as part of a two-book deal by Simon & Schuster. The sequel, Snapshot, was published in 2011.

Craig Robertson studied in Dundee and Stirling, and now lives in Glasgow.

Christopher Rush was born in the Fife fishing village of St Monans in 1944. He read English at the University of Aberdeen, and taught English in Edinburgh for thirty years. His semi-autobiographical A Twelvemonth and a Day was published in 1985 and was selected as one of the 100 Greatest Scottish books ever. Twelvemonth and a Day was also made into a film in 1988, Venus Peter. His books Hellfire And Herring: A Childhood Remembered and Sex, Lies & Shakespeare continue the account of childhood and teenage experience in Scotland of the 1950s and 60s.

Christopher Rush has twice won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards, and was short-listed for the McVitie’s Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year.

His most recent novel is a novelisation of the last days of William Shakespeare, simply called Will. In 2009 Rush edited Aunt Epp’s Guide for Life: Miscellaneous Musings of a Victorian Lady. The book contains the diary entries of his great-great-aunt, with guidance on topics ranging from copper kettles to chastity.

Football, religion, a dark and sometimes violent sense of humour are the hallmarks of Christopher Brookmyre’s novels. Born and educated in Glasgow, Brookmyre has worked for the film magazine Screen International, and as sub-editor for The Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News.

His first novel, the satirical Quite Ugly One Morning won the inaugural Critics’ First Blood Award in 1996 (for Best First Crime Novel of the Year) and was the first in a series of novels featuring investigative journalist Jack Parlabane. Parlabane also featured in Boiling a Frog, which won the 2000 Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective.

In 2010 Brookmyre was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Edinburgh Napier University. He is President of the Humanist Society of Scotland. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2013 he announced that a film version of All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye is in the pipeline with Emma Thompson keen to be involved. He also revealed that Bedlam is in development as a video game.

His latest book is Want You Gone.

Poet Christine De Luca was born and raised in Waas in Shetland, the daughter of a school headmaster. One of Scotland’s leading poets, she writes mostly in the Shetland dialect, as well as in English. As part of the Inta Shetland project she works to translate classic texts in to Shetlandic; her first translation was the Roald Dahl novel George’s Marvellous Medicine.

Her first poetry collection Voes & Sounds won the Shetland Literary Prize in 1994; her second collection, Was Wi Da Valkyries, was similarly awarded in 1997. Her most recent collection was Parallel Worlds, published by Luath Press in 2005, and a subsequent bilingual edition Mondes parallèles in 2007.

Mondes parallèles won the Poetry Prize at the 9th Salon International du livre Insulaire. Christine De Luca now lives in Edinburgh.

Playwright and novelist Chris Hannan was born in Clydebank in 1958. He attended St Brendon’s Primary School in Glasgow, then the Jesuit St Aloysius College. After graduating from Oxford University at the age of 20, he returned to Glasgow, first working in a homeless shelter and then becoming a full-time writer. He has written a number of plays which have been performed by the likes of the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has adapted the novels from Henrik Ibsen and Maxim Gorky for the stage.

Hannan has now turned his hand to prose, and his first novel, Missy, was published in April 2008.

He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Sarah.

Chris Dolan is an author, playwright and literary critic from Glasgow. Dolan is best known for his plays including The Veil and Sabina, and for his translations of Spanish drama. His first short story collection, Poor Angels and Other Stories, was published in 1995, and he has written for BBC Radio and TV. His first novel Ascension Day won the McKitterick Prize in 1998.

As a journalist, Chris Dolan has written for the Independent, Scotland on Sunday and BBC Radio Scotland, and is a literary reviewer and features writer for The Herald. He regularly appears on BBC Radio 3 and 4. In 1999 he won the Canongate Prize for Journalism. Dolan has also worked as a writer-in-residence in the Easterhouse and Drumchapel areas of Glasgow.

Charles Stross, 48, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella (The Concrete Jungle and Palimpsest), Stross’s works have been translated into twelve languages.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst). Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world’s first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk died).

Born in Ayr but educated at Eton and Edinburgh University, Charles Cumming is a writer of three spy novels, and a contributing editor of The Week and occasional reviewer for The Mail on Sunday.

In 1995, Charles Cumming was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (popularly known as MI6), and his experiences with MI6 helped shape his first novel, A Spy By Nature, which was published in June 2001. His second novel, The Hidden Man, was published in 2003. He moved to Madrid in 2001, and his third novel, The Spanish Game, involved a plot by the paramilitary Basque organisation ETA to bring down the Spanish government.

Charles Cumming now lives in London with his wife.

Charles Cumming, winner of the first Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award

Charles was awarded the inaugural Scottish Crime Book of the Year award for his novel A Foreign Country. The prize was presented at the closing of Scotland’s First International Crime Festival, Bloody Scotland, in Stirling.

Catriona McPherson was born in South Queensferry in 1965. She claims she ‘day-dreamed my way through twelve years at Queensferry Primary and High Schools constantly being told I was over-imaginative and full of nonsense’.

After finishing school, she worked in a bank for a short time, before going to university. She studied for an MA in English Language and Linguistics at Edinburgh University, and then gained a job in the local studies department at Edinburgh City Libraries, describing herself as ‘far from being the ideal employee.’

She left this post after a couple of years, and went back to university to study for a PhD in semantics. During her final year she applied for an academic job, but left to begin a writing career.

It proved to be the right move as after two years of writing, and one failed attempt at a literary novel, she created the character Dandelion (Dandy) Gilver, and wrote After the Armistice Ball. The first Dandy Gilver novel was short-listed for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger 2005 and the second was long-listed for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year Award 2007.

These days, McPherson lives with her husband on a farm in the Galloway countryside, where she spends her time writing, gardening, swimming and running.

Catherine Rayner is an award-winning author and illustrator. She studied Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art where, for her final degree show, she created what would go on to be her debut picture book.

Originally from Yorkshire, Catherine fell in love with the city of Edinburgh and still lives there with her husband and young son, and a small menagerie of animals. Winner of the 2009 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for her second book, Harris Finds His Feet, Catherine has now been shortlisted for the prestigious award four times. She was also awarded the Best New Illustrator Award at the Booktrust Early Years Awards in 2006 and was named one of Booktrust’s ten Best New Illustrators in 2008. In 2010, she was the inaugural illustrator in residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. As well as producing award-winning picture books, she also exhibits her artwork in galleries all over the world and illustrates her own range of greeting cards.

She finds huge inspiration in her pets and often uses them as models, frequently asking Ena the cat to pose so that she can study her posture and movement. Then she translates sketches of Ena into characters such as dragons and hares, not to mention moose and bears! But it was creatures of a wilder kind that inspired her first picture book, Augustus and His Smile – Catherine spent hours and hours watching and sketching tigers (in freezing temperatures) at Edinburgh Zoo.

And it must have paid off, because in 2006 Catherine won the Best New Illustrator Award at the Booktrust Early Years Awards and was also shortlisted for the V&A Illustration Awards 2006. Augustus and His Smile was then selected as one of five picture books to be recommended on Channel 4’s ‘Richard and Judy Christmas Party’ in December of that year. Since then, Augustus and His Smile has been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal, the ‘Read it Again’ Cambridgeshire Picture Book Award, the English 4-11 Award 2007 and the Royal Mail Scottish Children’s Book awards (0-7 category) 2007.

In 2008 Catherine was selected as one of the ten best new illustrators for Booktrust’s ‘Big Picture Campaign’. This was the year her second picture book, Harris Finds His Feet was published, which went on to win the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal in 2009. In 2010, she was the inaugural illustrator in residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. As well as producing award-winning picture books, she also exhibits her artwork in galleries all over the world and illustrates her own range of greeting cards.

Catherine MacPhail shot to success when her first children’s novel Run Zan Run won the Kathleen Fidler Award for new Scottish fiction. Since then Catherine has earned a reputation as a gritty, direct novelist, writing about everyday situations, such as bullying in Run Zan Run and teenage pregnancy (in Roxy’s Baby) and empathising brilliantly with her readers as a result.

Catherine always wanted to be a writer but with a job and a family to take care of, time was hard to come by: “I didn’t think wee lassies like me could do things like that. It was only after my children were born that I went to the local writers club; there, I was given the confidence to start sending my stories away.”

Since then she has never looked back, receiving widespread acclaim for her next two pieces of work; Fighting Back and Fugitive. Moreover, she is the creator and writer of the radio series My Mammy and Me.

Her latest children’s books include Hide and Seek, based on a blurb written in a competition for Barrington Stoke, and Grass and Out of the Depths.

The Govan-born osteopath and acupuncturist runs a large and successful osteopath centre in the west of Scotland. In between treating patients – both human and animal – she writes dark and gruesome crime thrillers set in Glasgow. She volunteers at a local animal rescue centre, using complementary therapies to heal a wide range of animals, and considers herself to be something of a ‘fox whisperer’.

Ramsay started writing her first novel while laid up in hospital with a back injury. She is a member of the Johnstone Writers’ Club. Absolution was recently published by Penguin as part of a two-book, five-figure contract. The second novel, Singing to the Dead, was published in 2009.

Although she is originally from Knaresborough in Yorkshire, children’s author Caroline Clough have lived in rural Aberdeenshire for over 30 years. After a science degree, she studied for a Masters in Animal Behaviour at Aberdeen University and has lived in Scotland ever since. She now lives north of Aberdeen in an old farmhouse, with her husband and many cats and horses.

Clough wrote The Animal Welfare Handbook in 1993, but later started writing fiction and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes. Her first novel Red Fever won the Kelpies Prize in 2010. The book was written in just ten days, in order to meet the deadline for the prize. A sequel, Black Tide, was published in 2012.

She is a a keen hillwalker with her husband, and has two adult children.

Carol Anne Davis is a writer of crime fiction- and non-fiction from Dundee. She left school aged just 15, but she studied Higher English at night school a few years later then went to college. Though her first love was writing, she took a job as an editorial assistant on a woman’s magazine. Later she studied for an MA in English and Social Administration at Dundee University, which lead to a life-long interest in criminality, and then took a postgraduate diploma in Adult & Community Education at Edinburgh University. After her diploma she became a full-time writer for magazines and tutored in non-fiction writing.

She now writes widely on the subject of criminality, murder and serial killings. Her fiction writing includes the crime thrillers Shrouded and Extinction, and she is known for “… who kill” series of non-fiction books.

In 1998 moved to the Salisbury in the south of England, where she now lives.