Magnificently multi-tasking Canadian author CAROL SHIELDS raised five children and wrote twenty books. The winner of major literary prizes, her work reached a broad international readership. She died in 2003. This interview with Ruth Thomas from the Scottish Book Collector archive took place in 2000. …

More…Carol Shields

Poet GERRY CAMBRIDGE tells the tale of his lifelong love affair with books and how he may one day be responsible for his parents’ deaths. …

More…The Caravan Library

RUTH THOMAS considers avian leitmotifs in her stories, but cautions against over-analysing texts. …

More…Recurring Phrases

A sense of belonging, and its elusiveness, is at the core of a new novel from RON BUTLIN. Here in an audio interview with Jennie Renton he discusses a book that has been variously described as a sophisticated literary thriller and as a modern morality tale. …

More…Sense of Belonging

You can’t include all of the poets all of the time, as poetry editors know all too well. Decisions and revisions that a moment won’t reverse have to be made. MICHAEL LISTER discusses the newly published The Oxford Book of American Poetry in the light of the criteria of earlier editors. …

More…Anthologising American Poetry

Theatre director DAVID ROYLANCE gives the background to the creation of Meslier, a new play about a largely forgotten but influential freethinker who lived almost 300 years ago. Part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

…

More…Meslier

Scottish Literature is examined from the inside out as Michael Lister reviews Why Scottish Literature Matters by Carla Sassi and Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of a Modern Nation by Alan Riach. …

More…Style and Substance: A Deeper Look at Scottish Literature

Jim McCarthy talks geopoetics in his review of Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White. …

More…Grounding a World

Rachel Boase discusses how she gained an irreversibly Sparkian vision from reading MURIEL SPARK’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. …

More…The Influences of my School Days

ANGUS DUNN talks about the inspiration for his first novel, Writing in the Sand, with his editor, Jennie Renton. With a quirkiness all of its own, this offbeat fantasy set in the fictional town of Cromness brings to mind Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure and Doctor Who. …

More…Angus Dunn’s Cromness Craic

What is our true identity and what is our purpose here on earth? Poet and traveller MORELLE SMITH looks beyond orthodox religious structures and finds inspiration in the landscape of Languedoc, relating it to the traditions of the mediaeval Cathars and troubadour poet-musicians of the same period, through the work of Michel Roquebert and Arthur Guirdham. …

More…Citadels of Vertigo and the Ethics of Desire

Owner of Argyll Publishing, DEREK RODGER, takes a look at the history of Scottish papermaking, with special reference to the mill at Carrongrove. From the Scottish Book Collector archives. …

More…Two Hundred Years of Papermaking

In her final column, MARGARET SQUIRES identifies the factors that have combined to cause the downturn in the secondhand book trade, which has resulted in the closure of hundreds of shops around the country in the last two years. The latest fatality, after thirty-seven years, is the Quarto, St Andrews. …

More…Google Google Gone

Two of the most important Scottish folksong and ballad collectors of the nineteenth century, ROBERT FORD and JOHN ORD are here recalled by Ian Spring, who gives an outline of his own experience of collecting their work over a period of more than twenty years. …

More…Robert Ford and John Ord: two folksong collectors from Glasgow

Precious little is known about the life of the artist and calligrapher ESTHER INGLIS (1571-1624). She came to Scotland with her Huguenot family and originally learned lettering from her mother. Margaret Macaulay did some detective work and the results of her research were first published in Scottish Book Collector. …

More…Mistresse of the Golden Pen