At the start of the first episode of Written in Scotland, the author Andrew O’Hagan points out that Scotland may be a small nation, but its literature can take on the best of Russian and American writing. It’s a big claim but one tackled with brio in four fascinating half-hour episodes now available on BBC Sounds.
In the series, made by Whistledown Scotland for BBC Radio 4, presenter Kirsty Wark talks to writers, poets and performers to explore the relationship Scotland’s writers have with the country.
From David Lyndsay’s play A Satire of the Three Estates, written in 1540,
to Douglas Stuart’s recent Booker prizewinning novel Shuggie Bain, we span centuries, taking the temperature of Scotland through its writers.
Outlander lovers will be fanning themselves with their eyelashes at the tale of Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir, a Jacobite soldier and Gaelic tutor to Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose poems were so rude they were burnt in public by Edinburgh’s public executioner.
In her familiar cut-glass Scots accent, Wark (a novelist in her own right) points out that Scottish literature is “multilingual”.
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There’s the Gaelic of poets such as Sorley MacLean (and what a treat to hear MacLean read lines in English from Hallaig as featured in Martyn Bennett’s album Bothy Culture), the Old Scots of Henryson and Dunbar, the Doric of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, the Scots/English of Robert Burns or Sir Walter Scott and even the “demotic Edinburgh Scots” of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
A straight line is drawn from the legacy of Scotland’s writers of yore to today’s thriving Scottish literary scene, which has many fine female writers. Janice Galloway is acknowledged as hugely influential by Stuart and Jenni Fagan, whose recent novel Luckenbooth has been garlanded with praise.
Audio of the 1994 Booker prize chairman of judges John Bayley’s “apologetic announcement” of James Kelman winning the prize for How Late it Was, How Late is cringeworthy. Kelman, the first Scottish writer to win the award in its then 25-year history, was not the judges’ unanimous choice. He was then forced to defend his use of Scots dialect on the night.
Andrew O’Hagan, who was present, says he recalls hearing Kelman’s speech with delight. “He was standing up for an essential cultural argument . . . that British literature is not just London literature, it’s the bold, multifarious, noisy, contradictory language of the people.”
4,000+
Amount of times the f-word is used in How Late It Was, How Late
Source: How Late It Was, How Late
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51
Number of years in which there have been two Scots Booker prizewinners
Source: Booker Prize
