Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
MACDIARMID TO MURIEL SPARK
Scotland's finest modern poet was Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve;
1892-1978). Originally from Dumfriesshire, he moved to Edinburgh in 1908, where he
trained as a teacher and a journalist, but spent most of his life in Montrose, Shetland,
Glasgow and Biggar. His masterpiece is 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle', a 2685-line
Joycean monologue.
Born in Edinburgh, Norman MacCaig (1910-96) is widely
regarded as the greatest Scottish poet of his generation. A
primary school teacher for almost 40 years, MacCaig wrote
poetry that is witty, adventurous, moving and filled with sharp
observation; poems such as 'November Night, Edinburgh'
vividly capture the atmosphere of his home city.
The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown (1921-96)
was born in Stromness in the Orkney Islands, and lived there
almost all his life. Although his poems and novels are rooted
in Orkney, his work, like that of Burns, transcends local and
national boundaries. His novel
Greenvoe
(1972) is a warm,
witty and poetic evocation of everyday life in an Orkney com-
munity; his last novel,
Beside the Ocean of Time,
a wonder-
fully elegiac account of remote island life, was published in
1994.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (born James Leslie Mitchell;
1901-35) was another Scots writer whose novels vividly cap-
ture a sense of place - in this case the rural northeast of Kin-
cardineshire and Aberdeenshire. His most famous work is the trilogy of novels called
A
Scots Quair
.
Dame Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was born in Edinburgh and educated at James
Gillespie's High School for Girls, an experience that provided material for perhaps her
best-known novel,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
a shrewd portrait of 1930s Edinburgh.
Dame Muriel was a prolific writer; her last novel,
The Finishing School,
published in
2004, was her 22nd.
Six Essential
Scottish Novels
»
Waverley
(Sir Walter Scott,
1814)
»
The Silver Darlings
(Neil M
Gunn, 1941)
»
A Scots Quair
(Lewis Grassic
Gibbon, trilogy 1932-4)
»
The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie
(Muriel Spark, 1961)
»
Greenvoe
(George Mackay
Brown, 1972)
»
Trainspotting
(Irvine Welsh,
1993)
THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE
The most widely known Scots writers today include the award-winning James Kelman
(1946-), Iain Banks (1954-), Irvine Welsh (1961-) and Ian Rankin (1960-). The grim
realities of modern Glasgow are vividly conjured in Kelman's short story collection
Not
