This year is a bumper year for Birlinn and Polygon authors at the Saltire Society’s Literary Awards, and rightly so. The winners are announced at the National Library of Scotland on St Andrews Day, and we’ll be keeping our fingers, toes and everything else we can cross crossed. Congratulations to all the shortlisted poets and writers, but particularly to … |
| Aonghas MacNeacail |
Aonghas MacNeacail – Aonghas’ collection poetry Laughing at the Clock: New and Selected Poems/ Déanamh Gáire Ris A’ Chloc: DáinÙra Agus Thaghte was published earlier this year to celebrate his 70th birthday. Described by James Robertson as ‘A fine record of a distinctive bilingual voice’, this is a poet at the height of his powers. The shortlist for Scottish Book of the Year is a stellar one this year with Aonghas up against Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, James Kelman, Ewan Morrison and Irvine Welsh.
Scotland: Mapping the Nation – Christopher Fleet, Charles W.J.Withers and Margaret Wilkes have produced that rarest of books, one that is historically rich and significant but which is also lavishly illustrated and just a joy to read. The history of Scotland has been told so many different ways, but the use of maps from the earliest times offers a fascinating new angle on the subject. The shortlist for Scottish Research Book of the Year also contains another Birlinn title …
The Grand Designer: Third Marquess of Bute – Rosemary Hannah has written an enthralling biography of one of the last great artistic patrons, the thirds Marquess of Bute. Fabulously wealthy, Bute worked closely with architects and artists to create some of the most remarkable interiors in Britain including the high Victorian Gothic exuberance of Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch and the wildly ostentatious Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. But he was also a man at odds with his times. A Catholic convert, he openly criticised his Church. A traditional Victorian Patriarch, he championed feminism and was intimately involved in his children’s lives.
And last, but definitely not least, on the Scottish History Book of the Year shortlist is Scotland's First Oil Boom: The Scottish Shale-Oil Industry, 1851–1914 by John McKay. Just as big, but less well known than its modern counterpart, the Scottish shale oil industry was just as big a boom as the North Sea industry. At its peak it employed 10, 000 people, it exploited new technology to produce a whole range of new products and paved the way for Scottish expertise to be recognised in the oil and petrochemical industry at large.
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