The Portable Veblen (Shortlisted for the 2016 Baileys Prize)

Family dramas have always provided writers with fertile subjects for comedy or tragedy; witness the grandeur of Shakespeare’s King Lear or the melancholy of Elizabeth Strout’s My name is Lucy Barton, a small gem of a novel longlisted for the same Baileys Prize this year. The Portable Veblen is Elizabeth McKenzie’s exuberant and surreal comic Read More

My Name is Lucy Barton (Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize)

In the heady carelessness of youth, I once announced brashly that “family” was a label for a certain false consciousness: kinship had to be earned from love and personal intimacy, neither made up from routine proximity nor the product of mere biology. In middle age, I see that there are all kinds of families that Read More

An Interview with Moira Forsyth of Sandstone Press

Moira Forsyth, Editorial Director at Sandstone Press talks to Gail Low about the history of the press, independent publishing, publishing in Scotland, submitting manuscripts and more. This edited transcript and interview, recorded 11 November 2015 at the University of Dundee, is part of a joint enterprise by MLitt in Writing Practice and Study programme there Read More

The Loney (Winner of the 2015 Costa First Novel Award)

Having been coaxed into seeing a horror film at a tender age, I’ve never since been able to gain enough distance from the gothic form to relish its thrills dispassionately. That half-glimpsed face in the darkened window or the unfamiliar shadow on the landing still results in one of those sudden irrational lurches of the Read More