THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Claire McFall is a Scottish writer and former English teacher now living in sunny Colorado. Her first book, FERRYMAN is a love story which retells the ancient Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of Hades who transported souls to the underworld. The novel won the 2013 Scottish Children’s Book Awards and was long-listed for the UKLA (UK Literary Association) Book Awards, as well as being nominated for the Carnegie Medal. TRESPASSERS (2017) and OUTCASTS (2019) complete the series. Her second novel, BOMBMAKER, was released by Templar Publishing in February 2014 and deals with terrorism and survival.

BLACK CAIRN POINT, released in the UK by Hot Key Books, won the inaugural Scottish Teenage Book Prize and is a paranormal thriller. It was released in the US by Source Fire Books as THE LAST WITNESS in January 2020.

Claire has been published in more than fifteen languages and her novels have sold more than three million copies worldwide.

Samantha has been a practising visual artist for many years, working across a range of media, including video, installation, drawing, photography and text, and her writing has emerged from this long creative evolution. Sam originally studied Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art, Belgrade Academy of Fine Art and the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), and has taught at Edinburgh College of Art, Tasmanian School of Art, and the University of the West of Scotland. She has an MA in Values and Environment from the University of Central Lancashire and has published in several academic journals on environmental philosophy and eco-art. She currently teaches at the University of the Highlands and Islands and online, and lives on Orkney.

Andrew James Greig was born in London and moved to Wales as a young teenager, before heading for the bright lights of Bristol. Here he developed as a musician, finding a talent for live sound engineering which took him touring all over the world. Now living with his family in Scotland where he enjoys exploring the Highlands and Islands, he has written a factual guide to folk dance (100 Favourite Ceilidh Dances – Luath Press) and the critically acclaimed One is One, a difficult to categorise tale with 13th century Thomas the Rhymer set in the present day – self-published on Amazon. Whirligig is his debut crime fiction novel, published by Fledgling Press on Mar 26th 2020.

Hannah Lavery is a Scottish poet, playwright and performer. The Drift, her autobiographical spoken word show, was part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s 2019 season and Black History Month 2019. Her play, The Lament for Sheku Bayoh, was commissioned by the Royal Lyceum Theatre, and performed as a work in progress as part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2019. She was awarded a Tom McGrath Playwriting Grant in 2015 for her play, British Book Of Trees, and a Megaphone Residency by the Workers’ Theatre in 2016 for The Drift. She also received Summerhall Lab support in 2019 for a new show about climate change titled Three Pints on a Sunday, co-written and performed with Colin Bramwell. She has had two short plays performed as part of Traverse Theatre’s Words, Words, Words and was commissioned to write a short play for the Lyceum Youth Theatre, performed by the company as part of their twentieth anniversary show in 2018. She has also been a featured poet at many spoken word and poetry nights including Neu! Reekie!, Sonnet Youth, Rally and Broad, Flint and Pitch and Loud Poets. Her poetry has been published by Gutter, amongst others. A first pamphlet of short fiction, Rocket Girls, was published by Postbox Press in 2018; a poetry pamphlet, Finding Seaglass: Poems from The Drift was published by Stewed Rhubarb Press in May of 2019.

Photo credit: Hazel Mirsepasi

BETH PEARSON is an award-winning graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. She has worked on pre-production of the drama series Outlander and at The Scottish Gallery, the oldest art gallery in Scotland. Beth is captivated by Scotland’s history and culture and says, ‘By visiting craftspeople from all round Scotland, I became truly immersed in the contemporary Scottish home. What inspired me the most was how the variety of work I witnessed was united in its love of local landscapes and bringing the outside in.’ The Coorie Home is Beth’s first book.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, where she studied poetry written by second-generation immigrant writers. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Book Society, Room Magazine, Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 and others. Alycia is the author of the chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind (forthcoming, BOAAT Press) and the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest in poetry. She received an MFA from the University of Oregon.

Her first collection, Another Way to Split Water, was published by Polygon in 2022.

Alan McClure is a writer and musician based in Galloway, south-west Scotland. His creative output is eclectic and prolific, encompassing oral storytelling, poetry, songs, novels, short stories and audio sketches. He is a founding member of Lost Wasp Records, singer and chief songwriter with Alan & the Big Hand, occasional member of The Wee Folk Storytellers and a solo performer of growing repute. He is also a primary school teacher, a job which provides constant inspiration and ample opportunity for explaining and discovering through stories and songs.

Martin Widmark is the bestselling Swedish children’s author of over 100 books. His titles consistently top Sweden’s bestseller lists and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Before becoming a full-time author, Martin worked as a middle-school teacher and a Swedish language teacher for immigrants, and now uses his experiences to promote reading and literacy for young people. He is the author of The House of Lost and Found (Floris Books).

Emilia Dziubak is an award-winning illustrator based in Poland. She is a graduate of The Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and has illustrated numerous children’s picture books that have been translated throughout the world. She is the illustrator of The House of Lost and Found (Floris Books).

Anthony O’Neill is the son of an Irish policeman and an Australian stenographer. He was born in Melbourne and lives in Edinburgh. He is the author of Scheherazade, a revisionist Arabian Nights epic; The Lamplighter, a psychological horror novel set in Victorian Scotland; The Empire of Eternity, a history-mystery involving Napoleon Bonaparte and the early years of Egyptology; The Unscratchables, a Swiftian satire featuring dog and cat detectives; and The Dark Side, a crime novel set on the far side of the moon.

Kate Milner studied illustration at Central St Martin’s before completing an MA in Children’s Book Illustration at Anglia Ruskin University. Her work has been published in magazines, and her illustrations and prints have been shown in London galleries and national touring exhibitions. Kate won the V&A Illustration Award 2016 and the Klaus Flugge Prize 2018 for My name is not Refugee.

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal and, most recently, Nine Lives. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage, the Hemingway Prize, the French Prix d’Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

Andy Howard is a leading wildlife photographer located in the Scottish Highlands. His principal subjects are mountain hares, otters, red squirrels, and the birds of the Cairngorms. Andy contributes to many periodicals and other outlets. He has a large following on social media and a popular web site.

Philip Marsden is the award-winning author of a number of works of travel, fiction and non-fiction, including The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers, and The Levelling Sea. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Cornwall.

Alex Preston was born in 1979. He lives in London with his wife and son. He used to work in the hedge fund industry and now writes occasional journalism and the lyrics of some of his brother’s songs. He studied English under Tom Paulin at Hertford College, Oxford and completed an MA at Birkbeck, focusing on the work of W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño.

Books editor Jane Graham is an arts journalist. As a BBC radio producer, she worked on Radios 1, 3 and 4 and Radio Ulster, with John Peel, Kirsty Wark, Mary Anne Hobbs, Ricky Gervais, and Steven Nolan. She has written for The Guardian, Uncut, The Sunday Times and The Scotsman and was a Belfast Telegraph columnist for ten years. She makes regular appearances on Radio Scotland. She has also worked closely with libraries and was Scotland’s first Reading Ambassador for CultureNL.

Polly Pullar is a conservationist, naturalist, writer and photographer specialising in wildlife and countryside matters. She is also a wildlife rehabilitator. She contributes to numerous publications including The Scots Magazine, Scottish Field, Scottish Wildlife, BBC Wildlife & The People’s Friend.)

Her books include Fauna Scotica, A Drop in the Ocean, A Richness of Martens and A Scurry of Squirrels.

In 2016 Polly was co-founder of Mallaig’s Book Festival, A Write Highland Hoolie!

She lives in Highland Perthshire with a burgeoning menagerie including owls, squirrels, a red deer hind, sheep, and three collies.

Donald S. Murray was a teacher of English for 30 years. Since leaving that profession, he has written full-time. His non-fiction work includes ‘The Guga Hunters’, ‘Italian Chapel, Orkney’, (Birlinn) and ‘Herring Tales’ (Bloomsbury). The latter was widely reviewed – from the Daily Record to the Economist – and like his book, ‘The Guga Stone’, chosen as one of the Guardian’s Nature Books of the Year. He has received the Jessie Kesson and Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowships in recent years. His forthcoming book is ‘The Dark Stuff – Stories from The Peatlands’ (Bloomsbury) which is to be published in April 2018. His Gaelic play ‘Sequamur’ was performed throughout Scotland, including the Edinburgh Festival, and also in Belfast, London and In Flanders Field Museum in Belgium. He was chosen as one of Scottish Literature’s representatives in the Pisa Book Festival, Italy (2016). His poetry has been widely published and several of his works chosen among the Scottish Poetry Library Poems of the Year.

Mason Cross is the author of the Carter Blake thriller series. The first book, The Killing Season, was published by Orion in 2014, followed by The Samaritan, The Time to Kill (titled Winterlong in the USA), and Don’t Look For Me.

Mason Cross’s short crime stories have been published in magazines including Ellery Queen and First Edition. His story, ‘A Living’, was shortlisted for the Quick Reads ‘Get Britain Reading’ Award.

The Killing Season was longlisted for the 2015 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, and The Samaritan was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club for Spring 2016. Mason lives in Glasgow.

Metaphrog are Franco-Scottish duo Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers, winners of The Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Awards 2016 Best Visual Artist. The Red Shoes and Other Tales and their Louis graphic novels are highly acclaimed internationally, and have received multiple award nominations, including three for the Eisner Awards (the Oscars of comics). Louis – Night Salad was Highly Commended for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards 2011. Metaphrog tirelessly promote the medium of comics and travel regularly to talk about their work. They are Patrons of Reading at Northfield Academy 2013-17, the first graphic novelists ever to fill such a role, and were Writers in Residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (2015).

Alex McCall grew up in Aberdeen and is currently studying Filmmaking and Screenwriting at the University of the West of Scotland. He has been published in several poetry and short story anthologies, and he was the winner of the Kelpies Prize 2013.