Alexander Smith was a Scottish poet, labelled as one of the Spasmodic School, and essayist.
Catherine Roxburgh Carswell was a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, now known as one of the few women to take part in the Scottish Renaissance. Her biography of the Scottish poet Robert Burns aroused controversy, but two earlier novels of hers, set in Edwardian Glasgow, were little noticed until their republication by the feminist publishing house Virago in 1987. Her work is now seen as integral to Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century.
Audrey Niffenegger is an American writer, artist, and academic. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003, was a bestseller.
Zoë Wicomb is a South African-Scottish author and academic who has lived in the UK since the 1970s. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.
Denise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir, she has also written for comic books, including 13 issues of Hellblazer.
Leila Fuad Aboulela is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Scotland in 1990 where she began her literary career. Until 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela's works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).
Karen Kingsbury is an American Christian novelist born in Fairfax, Virginia.
Zoë Strachan is a Scottish novelist and journalist. She also teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow.
Lara Vapnyar is a Russian-American writer currently living in the United States. She studied comparative literature at CUNY and worked with André Aciman and Louis Menand.
Jessie Kesson, born Jessie Grant McDonald, was a Scottish novelist, playwright and radio producer.
Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.
Jean Bedford is an English-born Australian writer who is best known for her crime fiction, but who has also written novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction. She is also an editor and journalist, and has taught creative writing in several universities for over 20 years.
Alex Gray is a Scottish crime writer. She has published 19 novels, all set around Glasgow and featuring the character of Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer and his psychological profiler Solomon Brightman, the earlier novels being published by Canongate and Allison & Busby and later books by Little Brown. She has also published magazine articles, poetry and short stories as well as stories for BBC radio schools programmes.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
Karen Thompson Walker is an American novelist. Her first book, The Age of Miracles, was published in 2012. Walker's second novel, The Dreamers was published in 2019. Walker has been featured in Jezebel, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more.
Catherine Lucy Czerkawska, is a Scottish-based novelist and playwright. She has written many plays for the stage and for BBC Radio 4 and has published numerous novels and short stories. Wormwood – about the Chernobyl disaster – was produced at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1997, while her novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize in 2005.
Dr Jenni Fagan FRSL is a Scottish novelist and poet. She has written several books including fiction novel The Panopticon, screenplays and several books of poetry. She was named Scottish writer of the year 2016 by The Glasgow Herald. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Leela Soma was a Scottish-based writer who was born in Madras in India, and lived in Glasgow.
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.
Helen Sedgwick is an author of literary fiction, science fiction and crime, a literary editor, and a research physicist.
