Donald Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and musician. His work has won several awards, including the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2009.
Alison Louise Kennedy is a Scots writer, academic and stand-up comedian. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction, and is known for her dark tone and her blending of realism and fantasy. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers.
Andrew Brooke Miller FRSL is an English novelist.
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His fiction and short stories feature accounts of internal mental processes of usually, but not exclusively, working class narrators and their labyrinthine struggles with authority or social interactions, mostly set in his home city of Glasgow. Frequently employing stream of consciousness experimentation, Kelman's stories typically feature "an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.".
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.
Theresa Breslin is a Scottish author. Winner of the 1994 Carnegie Medal. Breslin is the author of over 50 books. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book. In 2023 he won the David Cohen Prize.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
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."
Dilys Rose is a Scottish fiction writer and poet. Born in 1954 in Glasgow, Rose studied at Edinburgh University, where she taught creative writing from 2002 until 2017. She was Director of the MSc in Creative Writing by Online Learning from 2012 to 2017. She is currently a Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her third novel Unspeakable was published by Freight Books in 2017.
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.
The Scottish Poetry Library is a public library specialising in Scottish poetry. Since 1999, the library has been based at 5 Crichton's Close, just off the Canongate in Edinburgh's Old Town.
Robert Crawford is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Ross Raisin FRSL is a British novelist.
Ewan Morrison is a Scottish author, cultural critic, director, and screenwriter. He has published eight novels and a collection of short stories, as of 2021. His novel Nina X won the Saltire Society Literary Award for Fiction Book of the Year 2019. Literary critic Stuart Kelly described Morrison as "the most fluent and intelligent writer of his generation here in Scotland".
The Scottish Review of Books was a quarterly literary magazine published in Scotland. It was established in October 2004 with the support of the Scottish Arts Council. In 2009 it became a limited company with a board of directors, Scottish Review of Books Limited. It published articles by many distinguished contributors and commentators. The Review reached a circulation of around 320,000 copies per year. It closed in 2019 after funding was withdrawn.
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.
Valerie Gillies is a Canadian-born poet who grew up in Scotland. She was the second Edinburgh Makar from 2005 to 2008. Gillies has written for literary and arts reviews, the theatre, and BBC radio and television, and has worked with visual artists and musicians. She has also taught creative writing extensively.
