THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Alexander Trocchi was a prolific writer of novels and essays, of porn (for the Olympia Press in Paris), a magazine editor and bookseller, and one of the few Scottish writers who wrote in the Beat tradition of the 1950s and ‘60s.

He was born in 1925 in Glasgow, the son of an Italian father. He attended Glasgow University where Edwin Morgan, then a lecturer there, remembers him as a brilliant and charismatic but erratic student. He moved to Paris where he quickly found a niche (and a more sympathetic environment than 1950s Scotland), then New York, and then back to Britain, latterly settling in London, where he made a living writing, and selling rare books. His sometimes lurid private life became almost legendary with a succession of lovers, jobs, controversies, and a serious drug addiction, and tended to eclipse a serious consideration of his writing. He died in London in 1984; his latter years marred by a series of tragedies in his private life.

In the mid-1990s a flurry of writing and publishing about Trocchi brought his work to a new audience. Andrew Murray Scott published a biography, Alexander Trocchi: The Making of a Monster and edited Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader (both Polygon). The two Beat-influenced novels, Young Adam and Cain’s Book were re-issued in the 1990s (with the former translated into a film of the same name by David Mackenzie in 2003) as well as the Olympia Press titles by Canongate.

In the last few years, the profile of Alexander ‘Sandy’ McCall Smith has reached stratospheric levels, largely due to the success of the The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories. The stories, set in Botswana in Southern Africa, feature the intuitive and generous Mma Ramotswe and her small but successful private detective agency. The No.Ladies’ Detective Agency novels won the CWA Dagger in the Library award in 2004. Alexander McCall Smith has also won the SAGA Award for Wit in 2003.

McCall Smith was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but moved to Scotland to study law. Later he moved to Botswana to set up a new law school at the University of Botswana. McCall Smith now lives in Edinburgh with his wife and children, where he is professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University.

He has written over 50 books, including fiction, children’s books, and textbooks on medical ethics and law. The Isabel Dalhousie series, starting with The Sunday Philosophy Club, is set in Edinburgh.

Among Alexander McCall Smith’s newest books are The Double Comfort Safari Club and The Careful Use of Compliments. He is also the co-founder of an amateur orchestra called ‘‘The Really Terrible Orchestra”.

Alette J Willis is a storyteller and winner of the Kelpies Prize for her début novel. She was born in Oxford to Canadian parents, but moved to Canada when she was three. After completing a PhD in human geography at Carleton University in 2008, she and her husband moved to Edinburgh.

Willis is a teacher and research assistant at the University of Edinburgh. She also a professional storyteller, working with the Scottish Storytelling Centre and the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Although she has been writing short stories for many years, her first published novel was How to Make A Golem (And Terrify People), in 2011.

Alastair Scott is a travel writer, novelist, photographer and sailor. He was born in Edinburgh in 1954 and moved to Elgin a few years later. His love of the outdoors developed on walks with his father, and photography became a passion after completing “two useless degrees” at Stirling University. In 1978 he set off with camera and kilt on a five-year journey around the world, working and hitchhiking. On his return he started a photographic library, which he continues to run, and began writing a trilogy about his adventures.

Scot Free (‘How gratifying it is to welcome a young Scotsman as a major new travel writer…’ wrote the Glasgow Herald) was published in 1986, closely followed by A Scot Goes South and A Scot Returns. In 1987 he took a dog team across Alaska to the Bering Sea and wrote Tracks Across Alaska which was published on both sides of the Atlantic.

Feeling it was time to take a closer look at his homeland, Scott travelled Scotland in 1993 and Native Stranger was the result. Over the next decade he continued his travels, did odd assignments for radio and papers, wrote a guidebook, learned to sail and had his first novel published. Stuffed Lives is a satirical romp set in the Highlands. In 2003 he sailed solo round Ireland and his account of this journey, Salt and Emerald, is to be published in 2008. He is currently working on a new book about The Small Isles, and lives on the Isle of Skye with his wife Sheena.

Poet, essayist and translator, Alastair Reid was born in 1926 in Whithorn in Wigtownshire. After serving in the Royal Navy during WWII, he studied at St Andrews University. He was first published as a poet in 1951 with the New Yorker magazine, and has contributed many poets, reviews and reports for the magazine since then. A student of South American literature, he translated the works of authors such as Pablo Neruda and Jose Emilio Pacheco.

His own collections of poetry include Oasis, published in 1997, as well as earlier books such as Whereabouts, To Lighten My House and Weathering. He published over 40 books.

As a Professor of literature, he taught Latin American Literature in Spain, Switzerland, France, Greece, Morocco and across South America. Reid was actively involved in the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Wigtown Book Town projects. He died in 2014.

Alasdair Gray is one of the great figures of contemporary Scottish writing. Born in Riddrie, Glasgow in 1934, he went to Whitehill Senior Secondary school in the city before studying Design & Mural Painting at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s. Between 1958 and 1962 he taught Art at schools in Glasgow and Lanarkshire, and painted murals on a number of churches and other buildings in the city.

Gray then became a stage painter for a Glasgow theatre, and in 1963 he submitted the first book of his novel Lanark to a literary agent. It was rejected. Gray continued to paint and write playscripts for stage, TV and radio. Between 1977 and 1979, Gray was a Writer in Residence at the University of Glasgow.

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark was finally published in 1981 by Edinburgh’s Canongate Books, then a very small company who accepted Gray’s offer to design the cover of the book to save money. The novel, a semi-autobiographical mix of science fiction, fantasy and politics, won the David Niven and Saltire Society Awards. Canongate also won a Scottish Arts Council award for the book’s design. After the success of Lanark, Gray became a full-time writer, artist and illustrator. As well as illustrating his own works, and painting murals, he has also designed covers for Chapman literary magazine. A well known socialist, Gray has campaigned for Scottish independence and against nuclear weapons.

In 1992 he married his second wife, Morag McAlpine, and the following year won the Whitbread Novel Award for Poor Things. In 2001 Gray became joint professor of Creative Writing at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, alongside fellow writers Tom Leonard and James Kelman.

The writer Rodge Glass, who had been working as Gray’s secretary, wrote a biography of Gray in 2008. In 2011, Gray initially rejected a Saltire Society Award for his auto-biographical A Life in Pictures, though he later accepted the prize.

In November 2019, he received a Lifetime Achievement award by the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019, aged eighty-five.

Wining a Somerset Maugham award for Morvern Callar, the Encore Award for These Demented Lands and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year for The Sopranos, and one of Granta Magazine’s Best 20 Young British Novelists, Alan Warner has enjoyed enviable success with his four novels. His books are largely set in the fictional village of The Port, a location that many will nonetheless recognise as Warner’s birthplace of Oban.

Once considered part of the ‘chemical generation’ along with fellow Scot Irvine Welsh, the rural settings of his books are gritty and modern. His most recent novels are The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven and The Stars in the Bright Sky.

In May 2011, Warner was appointed a writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh.

Born in Glasgow in 1947, Alan Spence is an award-winning poet, novelist and playwright. His first poetry collection, Plop!, was published in 1970 and has since written several more collections. He is considered to be the leading Scottish haiku writer, with collections including Seasons of the Heart and Clear Light. Haiku and another Japanese poetry form, tanka, feature in his most recent novel, The Pure Land, which is set in 19th century Japan and tells the true story of Scotsman Thomas Blake Glover.

He has won a Scottish Arts Council Book award three times, was the SAC Scottish Writer of the Year in 1995, and in 2006 won the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland (Writing) Award in 2006. Alan Spence now lives in Edinburgh with his wife, where they run the Sri Chinmoy Meditation Centre. He is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, and has been Artistic Director of the Aberdeen Word Festival since 1999.

Alan Riach was born in Lanarkshire and took his first degree at the University of Cambridge, where he read English. He then studied for his PhD in the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University.

Alan Riach is a poet and from 1986 to 2000 worked in New Zealand at the University of Waikato, where he held the post of Associate Professor of English and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He specialised in 20th Century literature, teaching Scottish, Irish, American and Post-Colonial Literatures and Modern Poetry.

In 2001 he returned to Scotland and took up the post of Reader in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, since 2003 he has held a Professorship in Scottish Literature and is currently Head of Department.

Riach has contributed to many collections and written other books, including the monograph, Hugh Macdiarmid’s Epic Poetry, which was based on his PhD dissertation and was published in 1991 by Edinburgh University Press. He is also the General Editor of Carcanet’s multi-volume, The Complete MacDiarmid.

His latest of poetry, Clearances, was published in 2001 and Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005.

Edinburgh-based crime writer Alanna Knight has written over forty novels since the publication of her award-winning debut Legend of the Loch in 1969. Born and educated in Tyneside, she now lives and writes in Edinburgh after a time in Aberdeen.

She is the creator of the Inspector Faro series of Victoria detective novels, which are set in Edinburgh around the 1870s. Knight also has a series of novels featuring Faro’s daughter, Rose McQuinn, and has written a number of historical and gothic novels. She has also written for none-fiction books, numerous short stories, and two plays.

Alanna Knight is one of the three Femmes Fatales, and was a founding member of the Scottish Association of Writers. She is also an artist, and has created portraits of fellow Scottish authors. She has two sons and two grandchildren.

Alan MacGillivray is a teacher, lecturer and poet, born in Fife, raised in Dumfries and now living and working near Glasgow. He taught English in schools across Scotland, before lecturing at Jordanhill College of Education for fifteen years. He has also lectured in Scottish Literature at the University of Strathclyde. As an academic, he has written widely on Scottish literature, and has written two of the ASLS’s Scotsnotes guides (for Greenvoe and Iain Banks).

As a poet, MacGillivray has published three collections under his own imprint, and his latest book An Altitude Within was published by Kennedy & Boyd in 2010. His third collection, the saga of fnc gull, a twelve-part verse monologue, was selected as one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s best Scottish poems of 2009.

Alan Jackson was born in Liverpool in 1938, but moved to Edinburgh when he was aged just two. He attended Edinburgh University between 1956 and 1959, and made his first appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1960.

Although he has not been active publicly for a long time, Alan Jackson remains one of Britain’s cult poets. He was one of the prime movers in the poetry reading ‘scene’ of the 60’s and 70’s, giving hundreds of readings with Norman McCaig, Adrian Mitchell, Edwin Morgan, Pete Morgan and Brian Patten.

His publishers are: Penguin Modern Poets (1968), Fulcrum Press (1969) and Polygon (1989).

As he puts it: “Eventually it came to him that the point was to obey (live) the poetry rather than merely deliver it; and a radically different course of life began”. His two new titles, Walking Through Apocalypse and A Great Beauty are available from http://www.lulu.com/ .

Alan Jackson’s short poem, ‘Young Politician’, is to be found carved in the outer wall of the new Scottish Parliament along with quotations from Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Fantasy novelist Alan Campbell was born in Falkirk, and studied Computer Science at Edinburgh University. After graduating, he became a video-game developer, working on the controversial Grand Theft Auto series. His first novel was Scar Night, the first volume in a series called the Deepgate Codex, where he has created a unique fantasy city hanging from giant chains over a dark abyss. The second volume, Iron Angel, was published in 2008, and in 2009. The stand-alone fantasy novel Sea of Ghosts was published in 2011.

He now lives in South Lanarkshire and continues to write.

Alan Bissett was born and raised in Falkirk. He graduated from Stirling University with a first class degree in English and Education. After a spell as an English teacher at a secondary school in Elgin he returned to Stirling University where he gained a Masters in English Literature.

It was during this time that he wrote his first book, Boyracers and edited a second, Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction. Both books were published by Polygon in 2001. Bissett has had many short stories published in various literary magazines and anthologies. He has been short and long-listed for the Macallan / Scotland on Sunday short-story competition on four occasions.

He lectured in Creative Writing at the Bretton Hill Campus of Leeds University for three years, during which time he wrote his second novel, The Incredible Adam Spark. The book was published by Review in 2005 and a film version is being planned.

Both Alan Bissett’s first two novels use Scottish colloquialisms and reference popular culture, adding depth to the characters and locations. He has also written and performed a one-woman play called The Moira Monologues.

He now lives in Glasgow where he lectures on Glasgow University’s Creative Writing course. His most recent novel is Pack Men.

Best known for this Dr Findlay series of novels, Archibald Joseph Cronin was a doctor, novelist, dramatist and writer. He was born in Cardross and lived for a time in Helensburgh. His father died of tuberculosis when he was seven, and he and his mother moved to Dumbarton. A.J. Cronin studied at Dumbarton Academy, where he excelled in writing and sport. His family later moved to Yorkhill in Glasgow, and he studied medicine at Glasgow University, where he met his wife Agnes.

During the First World War A.J. Cronin served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a Surgeon Sub-Lieutenant, and then trained at a number of hospitals in Scotland and Ireland. He moved to South Wales to take up his first medical practice in the mining town of Tredegar. In 1924, he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines.

A.J. Cronin’s first brush with literary fame came with the publication of his debut novel Hatter’s Castle in 1931. He had taken time off work in 1930 after being diagnosed with a chronic ulcer, and used the rest and time to write. The success of Hatter’s Castle and his subsequent novels meant that he never returned to medical practice.

Many of his novels drew on his medical background, and his experiences working in the mining industry. The semi-autobiographical The Citadel has been credited with influencing the creation of the NHS, and many of his novels explored medical and religious ethics. The novella Country Doctor which introduce the character of Dr Finlay, the stories of which where dramatised by BBC TV in the 1960s, and again by STV in the 1990s. Many of his books where adapted for film, TV and radio.

In 1939 he and his family moved to the USA, living in many different states. Eventually he returned to Europe and spent the last 25 years of his life in Switzerland. He was godfather to Audrey Hepburn’s first son. Cronin died on 6 January 1981 in Montreux in Switzerland. Cronin continued to write into his eighties.

A.B. (Andrew Buchanan) Jackson was born in 1965 in Glasgow and raised in the north-west of England. After secondary school in Fife, he studied English Literature at Edinburgh University where he met fellow student Roddy Lumsden. They shared a flat for three years, learning from each other’s early poems and figuring out how to write better ones.

His first book, Fire Stations, was published by Anvil Press in 2003 and awarded the Forward Prize for best first collection that year. His poem ‘Acts’ was awarded 3rd prize in the TLS/Foyles poetry competition 2007.

He has created web sites for the poets Gerry Cambridge, Tim Turnbull and Alexander Hutchison, and currently works in knowledge management for NHS Scotland in Glasgow.

Karina Halle is a former travel writer and music journalist and the USA Today Bestselling author of Love, in English, The Artists Trilogy, and other wild and romantic reads. She lives in a 1920s farmhouse on an island off the coast of British Columbia with her husband and her rescue pup, where she drinks a lot of wine, hikes a lot of trails and devours a lot of books.