THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Robert J. Harris was born in Dundee and studied at the University of St Andrews where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Latin. He is the designer of the bestselling fantasy board game Talisman and has written numerous books including Leonardo and the Death Machine, Will Shakespeare and the Pirate’s Fire, and more recently The Artie Conan Doyle Mysteries, a series featuring the youthful adventures of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His first Richard Hannay novel, The Thirty-One Kings, was acclaimed by critics and readers alike and was listed by The Scotsman as one of the fifty best books of 2017. He lives in St Andrews with his wife Debby.

Paul Bristow has written for radio and television as well as running community projects, including the development of a social enterprise to encourage the use of graphic novels in the classroom. His first children’s novel, The Superpower Project, was shortlisted for the Kelpies Prize 2014. Paul is fascinated by Scotland’s mysterious history, including that of his hometown of Greenock, Scotland, where, in his day job, he manages a (supposedly) haunted building. If he could have a superpower of his own, it would be reverse parking.

Mark was born in Dundee, where he works as a primary school teacher. He lives in Fife and spends most of his spare time reading comics and writing stories. He is highly competitive but has yet to find a sport he’s actually good at. Slugboy Saves the World is his first novel.

Louise Greig is a poet and author born in Scotland. She has won several writing prizes, including the Manchester Writing for Children Competition and the Wigtown Poetry Prize. She is inspired by the Scottish landscape, and the company of animals. She lives in Aberdeen with her rescue greyhound, Smoky. Vanya Nastanlieva was born and raised in Bulgaria. She studied book design at The National Academy of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria, and received her MA in Children’s Book Illustration from the Cambridge School of Art. Her picture book Mo and Beau was Highly Commended in the 2011 Macmillan Prize for Children’s Book Illustration and was published in 2015. She currently lives in Cambridge, England.

Lindsay Littleson is a primary school teacher in Renfrewshire, Scotland. Since taking up writing for children in early 2014 she has published a short story with Walker Books, in addition to winning the Kelpies Prize with her first children’s novel, The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean.

Emily Dodd is passionate about science, wildlife and storytelling. She is a screenwriter for CBeebies science programme Nina and the Neurons and has written and presented science shows for the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the Scottish Seabird Centre, Edinburgh University, National Museums Scotland and Our Dynamic Earth. Emily was the 2012/2013 Scottish Book Trust Reader in Residence at Leith Library, Edinburgh. Among other fiction and non-fiction books for children, she is the author of Can’t Dance Cameron and The Grouse and the Mouse, also in the Picture Kelpies range. Kirsteen Harris-Jones completed a BA in children’s illustration for publishing, and has worked in advertising, graphic design and animation. She’s now a freelance artist living in Shropshire with her husband and three children. She is also the illustrator of Picture Kelpies The Grouse and the Mouse and No Such Thing As Nessie!

David MacPhail left home at eighteen to travel the world and have adventures. After working as a chicken wrangler, a ghost-tour guide and a waiter on a tropical island, he now has the sensible job of writing about yetis and Vikings. At home in Perthshire, Scotland, he exists on a diet of cream buns and zombie movies. David is also the author of Yeti on the Loose and the Thorfinn the Nicest Viking series. Richard Morgan is a professional illustrator who lives in Cambridge, England.

Alan Dapre is the author of more than fifty books for children. He has also written over one hundred television scripts, transmitted in the UK and around the world. His plays have been on BBC Radio 4 and published for use in schools worldwide. Yuliya Somina is an award winning illustrator from Moscow. She graduated from the Moscow State Art College with a degree in fine arts and began her career in animation. Yuliya has illustrated many books including Michael Rosen’s I Never Know How Poems Start and Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. She currently lives in Middlesex, England.

Polly Clark was born in Toronto and lives in Helensburgh on Scotland’s west coast, close to where W.H. Auden wrote The Orators. She is Literature Programme Producer for Cove Park, Scotland’s International Artist Residency Centre, and the author of three poetry collections. She won the MsLexia Prize for Larchfield, the Eric Gregory Award, and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Larchfield will be published by Quercus under their riverrun imprint March 2017. Her pamphlet A Handbook for the Afterlife was shortlisted in the 2016 Michael Marks Awards and a volume of New and Selected Poems, Afterlife, is due in 2018.

Juliet Conlin was born in London and grew up in England and Germany. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Durham. She works as a writer and translator and lives with her husband and four children in Berlin. She writes in both English and German. Her debut novel The Fractured Man was published by Cargo in 2013. She is currently working on her third novel, Exile Shanghai, set in a Jewish ghetto in 1940’s China.

Ross Mackenzie’s latest novel, Shadowsmith, is in bookshops now.  Aimed at readers aged 9-12, this chilling tale follows the attempts of one ordinary boy and one extraordinary girl to hunt down the dark forces engulfing a peaceful seaside village. MacKenzie’s previous novel, The Nowhere Emporium, won the Blue Peter Best Story Award 2016, the Scottish Children’s Book Award 2016 and the North East Book Award, and appeared on the shortlist for the Brilliant Book Award.

Sarah Forbes was born in Aberdeen and grew up in Stonehaven, though her mum is from beautiful Shetland, a place she doesn’t get to visit nearly enough.

Sarah started her career at DC Thomson in Dundee and is still a proud Dundee United fan! She then moved to London to work as a magazine journalist and book editor. Sarah was Fiction Editor at Scholastic Children’s Books and Senior Editor at Floris Books, and have written for Mizz, Bella, The Skinny, The Herald, The List and The Guardian. When she’s not writing, Sarah runs Lighthouse Literary (www.lighthouseliterary.co.uk.) and loves talking to kids and adults alike about reading, writing and the joy of making stuff up.

Sarah is the author of the Elspeth Hart books for 7-9 year olds: Elspeth Hart and the School for Show-offs, Elspeth Hart and the Perilous Voyage and Elspeth Hart and the Magnificent Rescue published by Stripes. Her children’s books are incredibly silly and full of stories about bratty school kids and disgusting dinner ladies.

Margaret Skea grew up in Northern Ireland at the height of the ‘Troubles’, but now lives in Scotland. She is an accomplished speaker, Creative Writing tutor and workshop presenter and has won or been placed in numerous competitions including, for short stories, Neil Gunn, Winchester, Mslexia, and Fish. Her debut novel, Turn of the Tide, received the Beryl Bainbridge Award for Best First Time Author 2014. The sequel A House Divided, was long-listed for the Historical Novel Society New Novel Award 2016.

More information is available on her website www.margaretskea.com or you can find her  on Twitter: @margaretskea1  and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MargaretSkeaAuthor.Novels/

Catherine Czerkawska is a multi-award-winning novelist and playwright based in Ayrshire, where she has lived for many years – in the heart of Burns Country. She has written plays for the stage, ITV and BBC Radio 4, and has published numerous short stories. Her eight novels include The Physic Garden and The Curiosity Cabinet, shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize and serialised on BBC radio in 2013. Most recently in 2016 The Jewel, which portrays the life of Jean Armour and her husband Robert Burns, was published (Saraband).

Chitra Ramaswamy is an award-winning journalist with more than ten years’ experience. She cut her teeth at The Big Issue before moving to The Scotsman, where she became one of the newspaper’s leading columnists, book reviewers, interviewers and feature writers. Now a freelancer, Chitra writes regularly for The Guardian and other publications, and often chairs events at festivals and regularly reviews on radio. Expecting (Saraband) is her first book. Expecting won the First Book Award at the 2016 Saltire Literary Awards.

Michael J Malone is the author of four crime novels featuring DI Ray McBain, who is well on the way to becoming one of Tartan Noir’s great detectives. His first, Blood Tears, won the Pitlochry Prize from the Scottish Association of Writers, while his latest, Bad Samaritan, was a Sunday Times Crime Club selection, particularly praised for its strong women characters and pithy dialogue.

Matt Bendoris is a feature writer and novelist who was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year Award 2015 for his second novel, DM For Murder (Contraband). He won the Arts and Entertainment Journalist of the Year Award at the Scottish Press Awards for 2016. Matt has been a journalist for more than 25 years, starting as a pop columnist for the Glasgow Guardian and working for the Daily Record, and for The Sun and Mirror in London, before returning to The Scottish Sun in 1996. Matt has also ghost-written two celebrity autobiographies. He lives near Glasgow with his wife, Amanda, who is a nurse, and their two children. His third novel, WickedLeaks, will be released in 2016.

Niall Campbell was born in 1984 on the island of South Uist, one of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and an Arvon-Jerwood Mentorship in 2013, and won the Poetry London Competition in 2013. His work has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including, Granta, The Dark Horse, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Best Scottish Poems 2011.

His debut pamphlet, After the Creel Fleet, was published by Happenstance Press in 2012. His first book-length collection,Moontide (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), won Britain’s biggest poetry prize, the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, as well as the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; it was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. First Nights: poems, a selection from Moontide plus new poems, is due from Princeton University Press in the US in 2016. He lives in Leeds.

Mary Paulson-Ellis was born in Glasgow and studied Politics and Sociology at Edinburgh University. She worked for several years in arts administration before giving it all up to become a writer. She began with an evening class as part of the Edinburgh University Open Studies programme in 1999 and went on to complete an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University in 2008. On graduating she was awarded the Curtis Brown Prize for Fiction in 2009 and was runner up in the Sceptre Prize that same year.

Mary’s short fiction has been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines including New Writing Scotland, Gutter and the Herald. She is both a Brownsbank and a Hawthornden Fellow and won the Maverick Award from the Tom McGrath Trust in 2011 for her children’s illustrated book project about an existential Jack Russell.

After detours into tour guiding for the National Galleries of Scotland, script-editing for BBC Scotland and running a small theatre company, her debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker was published by Mantle/Pan Macmillan in 2016.

Amy Liptrot has published her work with various magazines, journals and blogs and she has written a regular column for Caught by the River out of which The Outrun (Canongate 2016) has emerged. As well as writing for local newspaper, Orkney Today, and editing the Edinburgh Student newspaper, Amy has worked as an artist’s model, a trampolinist and in a shellfish factory. The Outrun is her first book. It has won multiple awards including the 2016 Wainwright Prize.