This winter, we’re zooming in on Scotland and the wealth of brilliant writers on the scene there.
Throughout Home Grown Talent Week, we shared with you the newest and the best of Scottish literature and, most importantly, what our reading groups thought of these titles.
To make all this happen, we teamed up with Publishing Scotland to offer six lucky reading groups in Scotland the chance to discover some of the best home grown talent around! Groups were invited to sign up to take part in our fantastic reading group project to celebrate local authors and champion books in their local area.
Six reading groups across Scotland have been busy reading and discussing the books in the spotlight! We’re thrilled to introduce you to our six featured writers. You can read our interviews with them and find out what reading groups thought of the book below:
Margaret Skea, author of A House Divided, Sanderling Books
Margaret Skea grew up in Ulster during the ‘Troubles’ but now lives in Scotland. A Linguistics degree from St. Andrews followed by Ph.D research into the Ulster-Scots vernacular led to a fascination with 16th and 17th century Scottish history.
An award-winning short story writer – credits include Neil Gunn, Winchester, Mslexia, Fish – she received the Beryl Bainbridge Best 1st Time Novelist Award 2014 for her debut novel Turn of the Tide. A House Divided is the eagerly awaited sequel, which can also beread as a stand-alone novel and will appeal to fans of both Winston Graham’s Poldark and CJ Sansom’s Shardlake.
Read our exclusive interview and reading group blog.
Marianne Wheelaghan, author of The Shoeshine Killer, Pilrig Press
Before becoming a writer Marianne was many things, including a croupier, a marketing manager for a company that sold warm air hand driers, a chambermaid, a cashier, a Brussels sprouts picker, but mostly she taught English and Drama in Germany, Spain, the Republic of Kiribati and Papua New Guinea. Food of Ghosts is the first novel in the bestselling Scottish Lady Detective series and like The Shoeshine Killer it is inspired by the time Marianne spent in the Pacific. Marianne’s first non-crime novel is the highly acclaimed The Blue Suitcase, an historic fiction based on her mother’s true-life and which tells the remarkable story of a teenage girl growing up in Nazi Germany.
Read our exclusive interview and reading group blog
Kirstin Innes, author of Fishnet, Freight Books
Kirstin Innes is a freelance writer, journalist and arts PR. She won the Allen Wright Award for Excellence in Arts Journalism in 2007 & 2011 and writes for the Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, the Herald, the List and the Independent. She has had a number of stories published in magazines and anthologies, and her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She was a founder of the Words Per Minute literary salon, named one of the best spoken word nights in the UK by both GQ magazine and BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. She has performed her work across the UK, in Australia and China. Fishnet is Kirstin’s first novel.
Read our exclusive interview and reading group blog
Alwyn James, author of The Malta Job, Ringwood Publishing
Alwyn James has had several non-fiction works published. Two of these, Scotland’s Roots, and Other People’s Heroes became well-respected leaders in their field.
The Malta Job is his first work of fiction to be published but he is already well-advanced with a follow-up In a Dead Man’s Chest which Ringwood hope to publish in 2015.
He has almost finished a fascinating Travelogue, Other Folk’s Scotland, which Ringwood will be publishing in early 2015. He is also working on Cursed Leaf, a history of Scottish Banknotes.
Read our exclusive interview and reading group blog
Moira Forsyth, author of The Treacle Well, Sandstone Press
Moira Forsyth grew up in Aberdeen, lived in England for nearly twenty years, and is now in the Highlands. She is the author of three previous novels and many short stories and poems published in anthologies and magazines. She worked for many years in Education, including teaching in a Young Offenders’ Institution in the North of England, then latterly in Highland as the strategic lead for government initiatives to assist young people to move on successfully from school. She has been with Sandstone Press since its inception in 2002.
Read our exclusive interview and reading group blog.
Jane Alexander, author of The Last Treasure Hunt, Saraband
Jane Alexander’s short stories and creative non-fiction has been widely published in a number of anthologies and literary magazines, including Mslexia, Litro and The Orphan Leaf Review. A winner of a major national story competition, and the recipient of a Scottish Arts Council New Writers bursary, Jane is also a lecturer in creative writing at the Open University.
Read our exclusive interview and reading group blog
Get Involved
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