William McIlvanney was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet. He was known as Gus by friends and acquaintances. McIlvanney was a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as "the father of Tartan Noir" and as Scotland's Camus.
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
Andrew O'Hagan is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".
Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar.
Peter May is a Scottish television screenwriter, novelist, and crime writer. He is the recipient of writing awards in Europe and America. The Blackhouse won the U.S. Barry Award for Crime Novel of the Year and the national literature award in France, the CEZAM Prix Litteraire. The Lewis Man won the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme's 10,000-euro Grand Prix des Lecteurs. In 2014, Entry Island won both the Deanston's Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the UK's ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year Award. May's books have sold more than two million copies in the UK and several million internationally.
Andrew Crumey is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper Scotland on Sunday. His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."
Helen FitzGerald is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. Her debut novel, Dead Lovely, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2007, and The Exit in 2015 by Faber & Faber. Viral was released in 2016.
Scotland's National Book Awards, formerly known as the Saltire Society Literary Awards, are made annually by the Saltire Society. First awarded in 1937, they are awarded for books by Scottish authors or about Scotland, and are awarded in several categories.
Jane Wenham-Jones was a British author, journalist, presenter, interviewer, creative writing tutor, and speaker who lived in Broadstairs, Kent, a town that appears in four of her novels.
Sara Sheridan is a Scottish activist and writer who works in a variety of genres, though predominantly in historical fiction. She is the creator of the Mirabelle Bevan mysteries.
Gavin Francis is a Scottish physician and a writer on travel and medical matters. He was raised in Fife, Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh as a GP. His books have won many prestigious prizes.
Freight Books was an independent publisher based in Glasgow. It published books for an English speaking readership, including award-winning literary fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction and humour. Freight Books was named Scotland's Publisher of the Year 2015 by the Saltire Society. Freight Books published the debut novel of Martin Cathcart Froden, the winner of the 2015 Dundee International Book Prize.
Kirsty Logan is a Scottish writer.
Graeme Macrae Burnet is a Scottish writer, whose novels have won and been nominated for several awards. He has also written occasionally for The Guardian, The Observer and Le Monde. His first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, earned him the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2013, and his second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. His third novel, The Accident on the A35, is a sequel to The Disappearance ofAdèle Bedeau. In 2017, he won the Author of the Year category in the Sunday Herald Culture Awards. One review in The Guardian described Burnet's novels as an experiment with a genre that might be called "false true crime". In July 2022, Burnet's novel Case Study (2021) was named on the longlist of the Booker Prize.
Regi Claire, is a novelist, short story writer and poet living and working in Scotland. Her native language is Swiss-German, but she writes in English, her fourth language.
Holly Bourne is a British author of young adult fiction. She is the author of best-selling novel Am I Normal Yet? and several other critically acclaimed books. She also writes online on feminist issues and writes for The Mix, a charity-run advice website for under-25s.
Oyinkan Braithwaite is a Nigerian-British novelist and writer. She was born in Lagos and spent her childhood in both Nigeria and the UK.
Claire Askew is a Scottish novelist and poet.
