This is an edited filmed interview of a conversation that took place between Kirsty Gunn, Cameron Twiddy and James Kelman in October 2016. Cameron Twiddy’s personal account of that interview was posted on DURA, 28 July 2017.
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, including several novels and poetry collections. Slavonic Dances, the name given to a series of orchestral pieces by Dvorak, is a happy title for this sequence of novellas whose characters Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of a filmed interview that can be watched by clicking on the image above.) Vivien Williams: Hello, I’m Vivien Williams and I am a research assistant at the University of Glasgow where I also completed recently a Ph.D on the cultural history of the bagpipe in Britain. The bagpipe Read More
Imagine waking up one morning to find a bask of crocodiles and their very unapologetic owner have moved in next door! Half allegorical, half magical realism, Kate Hamer’s mesmerizing “Crocodile Hearts” will even have you examining your own place within a community. This idea of how an outsider can threaten a quiet suburban existence is Read More
“[Claudette] doesn’t see a room, an alcove, a piece of flooring: she sees a work in progress, just waiting to be embarked upon.” This Must Be The Place. If there is one thing Maggie O’Farrell’s loyal readers expect, it’s a good disappearance. In this respect, her Costa short-listed This Must Be The Place follows in Read More
The year is 2116, and the place is an Independent Scotland. The Battle of the Sexes in which “men killed women killed men, fathers killed mothers killed fathers, daughters killed sons killed daughters …” (you get the idea) is 20 years in the past, superseded by a period of “kissing-and-making-up-and-fucking”. This results in the massive Read More
Madeleine Thien is not unused to being shortlisted for prizes, or winning them. Her previous work Dogs at the Perimeter was shortlisted for Berlin’s 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Internationaler Literaturpreis. She, as with the narrator of Do Not Say We Have Nothing Marie Jiang, is the daughter of Read More
Ian McGuire (Scribner, 2016); Hbk, £14.99 Ian McGuire was born near Hull and studied in Manchester and Virginia, USA. The North Water is McGuire’s second novel; his first, Incredible Bodies, follows the career of a University Lecturer. He is currently Co-Director of Manchester University’s Centre for New Writing. It might have been useful for McGuire Read More
My Italian Bulldozer is billed as a modern Commedia dell’arte and as such includes all of the expected players: The lovers, La Signora (the scheming female figure), Pierrot (the sad clown), Il Dottore (the mad professor), and the commoners. Main character Paul is a successful food and wine author who is struggling with the break-up Read More
J.M. Coetzee (Harville Secker, 2016); hbk, £17.99 Coetzee is canonical, curricular – you are unlikely to reach the end of an English degree without having read his Booker and Nobel prize winning novel Disgrace. Coetzee’s mature novels are dazzling, harrowing and beautifully written, in taut, elegant prose that never turns away from the sorrowful, traumatic Read More