Local Hero is a 1983 Scottish comedy-drama film written and directed by Bill Forsyth and starring Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Fulton Mackay and Burt Lancaster. Produced by David Puttnam, the film is about an American oil company representative who is sent to the fictional village of Ferness on the west coast of Scotland to purchase the town and surrounding property for his company. For his work on the film, Forsyth won the 1984 BAFTA Award for Best Direction.
Edwin Muir CBE was a Scottish poet, novelist and translator. Born on a farm in Deerness, a parish of Orkney, Scotland, he is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry written in plain language and with few stylistic preoccupations.
The 'Maggie' is a 1954 British comedy film produced by Ealing Studios. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick and written by William Rose, it is a story of a clash of cultures between a hard-driving American businessman and a wily Scottish Clyde puffer captain.
John Patrick Byrne is a Scottish playwright and artist. He wrote The Slab Boys Trilogy, plays which explore working-class life in Scotland, and the TV dramas Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin' Heart. Byrne is also a painter, printmaker and theatre designer.
Stephen Maxwell was a Scottish nationalist politician and intellectual and, from the 1980s, a leading figure in the Scottish voluntary sector.
The People's Palace and Winter Gardens in Glasgow, Scotland, is a museum and glasshouse situated in Glasgow Green, and was opened on 22 January 1898 by The 5th Earl of Rosebery.
Iain Crichton Smith, was a Scottish poet and novelist, who wrote in both English and Gaelic.
Freddie Anderson was an Irish writer, playwright, author, poet and socialist, born in Ballybay, County Monaghan, Ireland, who became an influential figure in left wing culture and folk music scene in Glasgow from the 1950s until his death in 2001.
Alan Norman Bold (1943–1998) was a Scottish poet, biographer, journalist and saxophonist. He was born in Edinburgh.
Kenneth White is a Scottish poet, academic and writer.
William Campbell Rough Bryden was a Scottish stage and film director and screenwriter.
Cencrastus was a magazine devoted to Scottish and international literature, arts and affairs, founded after the Referendum of 1979 by students, mainly of Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, and with support from Cairns Craig, then a lecturer in the English Department, with the express intention of perpetuating the devolution debate. It was published three times a year. Its founders were Christine Bold, John Burns, Bill Findlay, Sheila G. Hearn, Glen Murray and Raymond J. Ross. Editors included Glen Murray (1981–1982), Sheila G. Hearn (1982–1984), Geoff Parker (1984–1986) and Cairns Craig (1987). Raymond Ross was publisher and editor of the magazine for nearly 20 years (1987–2006). Latterly the magazine was published with the help of a grant from the Scottish Arts Council. It ceased publication in 2006.
Scotland has produced many films, directors and actors.
Tom Hubbard was the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and is the author, editor or co-editor of over thirty academic and literary works.
The Celtic Media Festival, formerly known as the Celtic Film and Television Festival, aims to promote the languages and cultures of the Celtic nations in film, on television, radio and new media. The festival is an annual three-day celebration of broadcasting and film from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Isle of Man, Galicia, Cornwall and Brittany. The festival was founded in 1980.
John Duncan Macmillan is a Scottish art historian, art critic, and writer.
Robert Cairns Craig is a Scottish literary scholar, specialising in Scottish and modernist literature. He has been Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen since 2005. Before that, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, serving as head of the English literature department from 1997 to 2003. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005.
John Macmillan Herdman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and literary critic. He is the author of seventeen books including five novels and various works of shorter fiction, a play, two critical studies and a memoir, and he has contributed to twenty other books. His work has been translated, broadcast and anthologized, and taught at universities in France, Australia and Russia.
Dr Elspeth King is a Scottish curator, writer and social historian. She is known for her role as curator of social history at the People's Palace Museum in Glasgow, as Director the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, and for her scholarship on the Scottish Suffrage movement.
Bill Findlay was a Scottish writer and theatre academic. As a translator, editor, critic and advocate, he made an important contribution to Scottish theatre. He worked as a lecturer in the School of Drama at Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University and was a founder editor and regular contributor to the Scottish and international literature, arts and affairs magazine, Cencrastus.
