When Thomas More sketched out his vision in the sixteenth century of a sun-struck island idyll bobbing away merrily in the Atlantic swell, he ignited a centuries-long quest in dreamers and seekers across the world: the search for Utopia. Some took the sun as their guide, heading south in their pursuit of perfection; others, seduced by wild Romantic mists, followed the whale road north and landed on Scotland’s shores, waiting for paradise to emerge from the haar.

 In this new issue, we unroll Scotland’s literary map and set off in search of Utopia. 

Editorial

• Halfway to Paradise

Articles

• ‘Better to Create Your Own’: On the Legacy and Utopianism of Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series (Joseph S. Norman)
• ‘Class’d with Tasso and Guarini’: Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (Craig Lamont)
• ‘I am Iron Bard’: Edwin Morgan, Concrete Poetry and the Glasgow High Rises (Greg Thomas)
• Lunarians and Reformers: Mary Hamilton’s Utopian Writings (Nicole Pohl)
• The Islands Are Not Lost, The Compass Is (Kevin MacNeil)

Upon Another Point

•  Myth and history: A story of ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ and other family mysteries (Thomas Fox Averill)

New Book Reviews

ASL is seeking applications to be a co-editor of New Writing Scotland, from writers currently based in Scotland. Applicants should have a strong publishing record of their own, with a focus on poetry; previous editorial experience would be an advantage. The post will run for up to three years from 2024, for volumes 42, 43, and 44, publishing in 2024, 2025, and 2026 (dependent on funding). 

Our editors jointly select approximately 50 pieces – poetry and prose – from the English- and Scots-language submissions we receive each year. The submissions are anonymised, and we provide editors with paper copies to read. As an editor, we’d ask you to attend launches in Edinburgh and Glasgow, assuming that physical launches are possible/practicable (travelling expenses would be paid). Editors receive an annual £1500 stipend and full editorial credit.

We encourage applications from all backgrounds and particularly welcome applications from people who are under-represented within the sector, including from BPOC applicants (Black people and People of Colour), disabled people, LGBTQIA+ applicants and those from a low socioeconomic background. 

Please send a CV and a one-page application letter, outlining your qualifications for the position, to office@asls.org.uk by midnight on Sunday 26 November 2023.

Submission to New Writing Scotland is free and open to all. You can find our submission instructions on our website.

Saturday 7 August, 10:00–16:00, James Watt South Building, University of Glasgow

The ASL Schools Conference will offer CPD in areas of language and literature for teachers of English, for BGE, National 5, Higher, and Advanced Higher. The presentations will cover drama, poetry, novels, film and television, and creative writing, in English and Scots.

Please note, this event is aimed at teachers and teachers-in-training, specifically those who are or are likely to be delivering the English curriculum in Scotland.

Programme

• 9:45 Registration
• 10:10–10:15 Welcome
• 10:15–10:30 Teaching Resources for Walter Scott (Anna Fancett)
• 10:30–11:05 Approaches to Creative Writing (Alan Bissett)
• 11:05–11:25 Coffee
• 11:25–12:00 Three Novels for BGE (Maureen Farrell)
• 12:00–12:35 Presentations of Scotland on Screen (Helen Bradshaw)
• 12:35–1:00 Young Writers Awards
• 13:00–14:00 Lunch
• 14:00–14:35 Gaelic Drama for the English Classroom (Michelle Macleod)
• 14:35–15:10 The Scottish Ballads (Kirsteen McCue) 
• 15:10–15:20 Break
• 15:20–16:00 Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s Makar, will speak about her work
• 16:00 End of Conference

We plan to stream this event live on our YouTube channel. Although free printed resources and class sets will only be provided to those who attend in person, we will endeavour to make these materials available as free downloads from our website after the conference.

Alan Bissett is a novelist, playwright and performer who writes across a range of media – prose fiction, theatre, TV, radio – and was trained as secondary school English teacher.

Helen Bradshaw is a teacher of English and is the Faculty Head of English, Drama and Literacy at Strathaven Academy.

Anna Fancett is a teacher, storyteller, and scholar. She is currently working with the University of Aberdeen’s Walter Scott Research Centre to promote the work of Walter Scott to school pupils.

Maureen Farrell is a former teacher of English, and is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist, and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2021 she became Scotland’s fourth Makar.

Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow, and Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies.

Michelle Macleod is Professor of Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen. Her 2021 anthology Dràma na Gàidhlig: Ceud Bliadhna air an Àrd-ùrlar / A Century of Gaelic Drama won the Gaelic Literature Award for Best Non-Fiction Book.

ASL gratefully acknowledges the support of the Scottish Government towards this conference.

New Writing Scotland publishes works by writers resident in Scotland or Scots by birth, upbringing or inclination.

All forms of writing are invited: autobiography and memoirs; creative responses to events and experiences; drama; graphic artwork (monochrome only); poetry; political and cultural commentary and satire; screenplays; short fiction; travel writing or any other creative prose may be submitted. We have a maximum recommended length of 3,500 words in total. Please do not send complete novels or other long works, although self-contained extracts are acceptable. The work must be neither previously published nor accepted for publication and may be in any of the languages of Scotland. 

From 1 August 2023, submissions are invited for New Writing Scotland 42, publishing in summer 2024. Prose pieces should be double-spaced and carry an approximate word-count. Please do not put your name on your submission; instead, please provide your name and contact details, including email and postal addresses, on a covering letter. If you are sending more than one piece, please group everything into one document. The deadline is midnight (GMT) on 31 October 2023.

Visit our Submittable page to submit your work

We have limited space in each edition, and therefore shorter pieces are more suitable – although longer items of exceptional quality may still be included. A maximum length of 3,500 words is suggested. Please send no more than four poems, or one prose work. Successful contributors will be paid at a rate of £25 per published page.

Submission is free. Authors retain all rights to their work(s), and can submit and/or publish the same work(s) elsewhere after they appear in New Writing Scotland.

Authors retain all rights to their work(s), and are free to submit and/or publish the same work(s) elsewhere after they appear in New Writing Scotland.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact us. Details can be found on our contact page.

New Writing Scotland is the principal forum for poetry and short fiction in Scotland today. Every year it publishes the very best from both emerging and established writers, and lists many of the leading literary lights of Scotland among its past (and present) contributors. nothing but a set of eyes for stars: New Writing Scotland 41 is the latest collection of excellent contemporary literature, drawn from a wide cross-section of Scottish culture and society, and includes new work from thirty-nine authors – some internationally renowned, and some just beginning their careers.

Pre-order nothing but a set of eyes for stars: New Writing Scotland 41

Read the Editors’ Introduction

Education and Literature are old school friends. With buttoned-up blazer and responsible shoulders, Education sits at the front of class, passing to its peers the tools needed to navigate the world that loiters restlessly at the gates. Literature, that wild-eyed dreamer, lurks at the back of the room, scars the desk with secrets and stories, and breathes life into the lesson. In this new issue of The Bottle Imp, we timetable a literary lesson on Scotland’s schools and teachers.

Editorial

• Everyday’s A Schuil Day

Articles

• “The most exhausting of all ways to make a living”: School Teaching and Education in the Life and Work of Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith (Emma Dymock)
• Fae Tantallon tae TikTok: a decade o Scots at Schuil (Jamie Fairbairn)
• George Friel, Muriel Spark, and “the music of what happens” (Linden Bicket)
• Hugh Miller (1802–1856) and the Crucible of Childhood (David Alston)
• Sonny and Me: Writing for YAs (Ross Sayers)
• Teaching Tyranny: The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie (Kaiyue He)

A video of Dr Leith Davis’s talk, given on 11 April this year.

“The Lyon in Mourning” manuscript (1747–1775), currently held by the National Library of Scotland, is a unique document in Scottish history. Compiled by Jacobite clergyman Robert Forbes after the suppression of the final Jacobite Rising in 1746, the work consists of ten small volumes of transcribed conversations, narrative accounts, poems, songs, letters and even material relics such as scraps of fabric and pieces of a boat.

Forbes’s manuscript is currently the focus of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded Partnership Grant between Simon Fraser University’s Research Centre for Scottish Studies (RCSS) and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) and the National Library of Scotland (NLS). Using the digital images of the manuscript hosted on Simon Fraser University Library’s website, the project uses TEI encoding to display and analyse the contents of “The Lyon in Mourning.” The project will provide new evidence about the nature and extent of Jacobite activity in post-1745 Scotland, focusing in particular on the role of women, Gaelic-speakers and labouring-class individuals. In this talk, Dr Leith Davis offers an overview of the project and discusses the results to date.

Dr Leith Davis is a Professor in the Department of English and the Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University.