Free to stream: East German adaption of Stevenson's Kidnapped @scottlyall.bsky.social www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/de/online/st...

Season's Greetings from the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures ❄️ Beannachdan na Ràithe bho Chomann Eadar-Nàiseanta airson Sgrùdadh Litreachas na h-Alba ✨ William Crozier: 'Edinburgh in Snow' (about 1928), National Galleries of Scotland, tinyurl.com/mryzywuk

Sundown over Tayport

Sundown over Tayport

A new essay from me on the contentious topic of the sexuality of James VI and I - an attempt to get past the old ‘did he or didn’t he’ by looking at the king’s style as read by his contemporaries and subsequent historians. King James - QAF. main--britishartstudies-29.netlify.app/issues/29/qu...

Five years of editing SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW with the fab @rhonabrown.bsky.social and more exciting issues to come in 2026. The latest bumper issue is out now. Get yours by joining @asls.org.uk here: share.google/P8K28t8SNfWU...

I'm organising this hybrid training event on PhD thesis to book for @sgsah.bsky.social Literature+ Catalyst on Fri 16 January. Great speakers inc. Sarah Bernstein, @drjamesbailey.bsky.social, @hannahkateboast.bsky.social, @emilyalder.bsky.social. Please sign up! www.sgsah.ac.uk/e_t/dp/disci...

Submitted the last major edit of my book, An Injury To All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class. I'm looking forward to An Injury To All being published in October 2026!

My review of William K. Malcolm's new biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon is out now in SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW and is available to download on Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/pub/243/arti...

The relative calm before Storm Bram tonight on Bruntsfield Links in Edinburgh #Edinburgh #StormBram #Weather

SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW 17/2 (Autumn/Winter 2025) The latest issue of Scottish Literary Review is online now via @projectmuse.bsky.social (institutional access required). Print copies will be in the mail to subscribers shortly! #litstudies muse.jhu.edu/issue/55415

My review of William K. Malcolm's new biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon is out now in SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW and is available to download on Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/pub/243/arti...

Lots in this one! Iain Crichton Smith, two portions of James Hogg, William Thom, Susan Ferrier, Robert Burns, Tom Nairn, Rauf Coilyear, Muriel Spark, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, James Beattie and a generous helping of reviews. Tuck in! @asls.org.uk @scottlyall.bsky.social

The latest edition of SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW, edited by @rhonabrown.bsky.social and me, is now live on Project MUSE. This is a bumper edition, so fill yer boots! @asls.org.uk share.google/zC2gG3GXNdlu...

The latest edition of SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW, edited by @rhonabrown.bsky.social and me, is now live on Project MUSE. This is a bumper edition, so fill yer boots! @asls.org.uk share.google/zC2gG3GXNdlu...

Nominations are open for the newly-founded Scottish Literary Studies Book Prize, administered by the Universities Committee for Scottish Literature and awarded biennially to an outstanding work of scholarship in the field of Scottish literary studies. £300 prize. ucsl-scotland.com/scottish-lit...

Nominations are open for the newly-founded Scottish Literary Studies Book Prize, administered by the Universities Committee for Scottish Literature and awarded biennially to an outstanding work of scholarship in the field of Scottish literary studies. £300 prize. ucsl-scotland.com/scottish-lit...

Cover photo shoot for Hejira, one of her greatest albums.

Sad to hear that Perth & Kinross Council has decided not to retain the William Soutar House. Family don't want it and so it is being sold. This is where the bed-bound Soutar wrote much of his poetry and his diaries. A blow to Scotland's cultural heritage. share.google/tQQtdtkYpWfJ...

Sad to hear that Perth & Kinross Council has decided not to retain the William Soutar House. Family don't want it and so it is being sold. This is where the bed-bound Soutar wrote much of his poetry and his diaries. A blow to Scotland's cultural heritage. share.google/tQQtdtkYpWfJ...

Happy St Andrew’s Day! Alasdair championed Scottish independence and believed Scotland could be a nation with a new vision of itself. His 2014 screen print artwork reads: “Is Scotland a Possible Nation? Yes—Make It!” #alasdairgray #standrewsday

Western sky

You might like this @dedalusdenaries.bsky.social, by Don Paterson. open.substack.com/pub/northsea...

Beach Rothko

Beach Rothko

My one true god descends

Reigniting Spark: Jewish Values in the Modernism of Muriel Spark 26 Nov, @iashedinburgh.bsky.social & online – free Prof Holli Levitsky investigates how Spark navigates her Jewish identity amidst the broader themes of modernity, nationalism, & personal identity www.iash.ed.ac.uk/event/profes...

Blue

Debut novel wins Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2025 | The Herald share.google/fith9Z90VkVf...

Call for Papers: 5th World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Scotland Along the New Silk Road (17-20 June 2027, Nanjing Normal University, China). Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2026.

🔴 Muriel Spark to be honoured in first ever memorial dedicated to a woman in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens www.scotsman.com/arts-and-cul...

Villagers lose fight to stop ‘Sunset Song church’ being sold www.thetimes.com/article/9e72...

Lunch companion

Poet, writer, artist, & avant-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was born 100 years ago #OTD, 28 Oct, in Nassau, Bahamas. His father was a bootlegger, & Finlay was sent, aged 6, to Larchfield, a boarding school in Helensburgh, Scotland, where WH Auden had recently joined the staff A 🎂🧵 1/9

Sydney Goodsir Smith, one of the great lyric and love poets of the twentieth century in any language, not merely Scots. His reputation still, and wrongly, sits in the shadow of Hugh MacDiarmid. Smith's Under the Eildon Tree: A Poem in XXIV Elegies, is one of the great poetic sequences in Scots.

#31DaysofHalloween #Halloween #Halloween2025. It was reading this book at 19—with all its dizzying imagery of ancient sacrifice & ordeals by fire & water—that drew me into anthropology. McNeill lovingly recycles all sorts of pseudo-ethnographic mumpsimus—BUT she does conjure seasonal eldritch magic

Call for Papers: ‘Our three-voiced country’: Twentieth-century cross-currents in Gaelic and other Scottish writing. The 2026 annual conference of the Association for Scottish Literature will be held at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on 26–28 June.

Autumn Edinburgh sky

Dreaming the Daily Darg: Working Lives in Scottish Writing since 1918 Studies in Scottish Literature 50/1, 2025 A special issue exploring work & working life in Scottish writing chiefly of the 20th & 21st centuries – available now on Open Access #litstudies scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol50/is...

A new revised and annotated edition of Sydney Goodsir Smith's Collected Poems was published this year by Calder. Looking forward to working my way through it.

A new revised and annotated edition of Sydney Goodsir Smith's Collected Poems was published this year by Calder. Looking forward to working my way through it.

To Fife and beyond

Swans on the Tay. And heard pink-footed geese arriving

To Fife and beyond

Swans on the Tay. And heard pink-footed geese arriving

For those of you in Scotland, come along to the launch of Race and the Scottish Enlightenment at @iashedinburgh.bsky.social! Bruce and I will be introducing the book, and we’re thrilled to be joined by the formidable Colin Kidd, Thomas Ahnert, Matthew D Eddy, Rosi Carr and Ian Stewart. Programme⬇️

Indian summer in Edinburgh

Anyway, today is World Migratory Bird Day, so I invite you to spend a minute contemplating those extraordinary journeys, perhaps by looking at the European Migration Atlas. migrationatlas.org

Looking at John Bellany's work in the NLS today. This is 'Pourquoi? II', which Bellany painted after visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1967 - a life-changing moment for the artist. Resurrection?