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 entirely your own and produced without the assistance of generative AI. It must be neither previously published nor accepted for publication and may be in any of the languages of Scotland.

From 1 August 2024, submissions are invited for New Writing Scotland 43, publishing in summer 2025. 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 the covering letter. If you are sending more than one piece, please group everything into one document. The deadline is midnight (GMT) on 31 October 2024.

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 £50 for the first published page and £25 for each subsequent 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.

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

Saturday 5 October, 9:45 a.m.–4 p.m.

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, short stories, language study, 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 Coffee and Registration
— 10:15 Welcome
— 10:30–11:00 Exploring Scottish place-names (John Hodgart)
— 11:00–11:30 Why read John Buchan in the twenty-first century? (David Goldie)
— 11:30–11:50 Tea and coffee
— 11:50–12:00 Four short stories by John Buchan (Bob Hume)
— 12:00–12:35 Fae Eejit Street tae Tam o Shanter (Matthew Fitt & Thomas Clark)
— 12:35–13:00 Young Writers Awards
— 13:00–14:00 Lunch
— 14:00–14:35 Teaching the medieval poets Barbour and Henryson (Rhiannon Purdie)
— 14:35–15:10 Gaelic drama for the English classroom (Michelle Macleod)
— 15:10–15:20 Break
— 15:20–16:00 Meet the writer: Graeme Armstrong will speak about his work (please note: this talk will be in-person only and will not be recorded)
— 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.

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Graeme Armstrong is a Scottish writer from Airdrie whose teenage years were spent within North Lanarkshire’s gang culture. His bestselling debut novel The Young Team (Picador, 2020) won a Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the Scots Book o the Year 2021. In 2023, Graeme was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Thomas Clark is a journalist, playwright, poet, and writer whose principal area of expertise is in the Scots language. He has extensive experience both as a performer and as an educator, and has led workshops and given talks on the Scots language for groups of all ages and experience levels.

Matthew Fitt is an author and poet, and co-founder of the award-winning imprint Itchy-Coo. He is also a qualified teacher, and has taught Scots in over a thousand schools.

David Goldie is the former Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde, and is current President of ASL.

John Hodgart is the former Principal Teacher of English at Garnock Academy, and Secretary of the Education Committee of the ASL.

Bob Hume is a former teacher of English.

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

Rhiannon Purdie is Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews, and runs the Read Older Scots project producing online resources for literature written in Scots before 1700.

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

If we Unreliable Narrators know anything at all, it’s that memory is a fickle and fallible creature. In good faith we pack our bags to take an honest trip down Memory Lane only to find reminiscences running into one another like dye, all swirling colours and patchy conversation. Try as we might to pin it down, the past wriggles out of our grasp, leaving us to try and plug the gaps with half-faded whos, wheres, hows and whys.

In this new issue, we open our big Book of Lives to introduce the stories behind a selection of Scottish memoirs – the personal, historical, and fictional. 

Editorial

• Rememoir This?

Articles

• ‘What can this work be?’: James Hogg and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Gillian Hughes)
• Born in Kyle: A Love Letter tae an Ayrshire Childhood (Billy Kay)
• Haste Ye Back: Dorothy K. Haynes and the Importance of Childhood Memory (Craig Lamont)
• Memorialising Through Memoirs: Robert Forbes’s ‘The Lyon in Mourning’ Manuscript (Leith Davis)

New Book Reviews

Wednesday 10 July, 12–6 p.m., Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow, G11 6EW

This one-day symposium is a landmark opportunity to discuss the status of queer writing in Scottish literature. The event celebrates the launch of the Scottish Literary Review special issue, ‘Queer Form in Scottish Writing’, co-edited by Zoë Strachan and Darryl Peers. The day will gently disrupt the form of the academic symposium, giving attendees plenty of opportunity to engage with the ideas and topics raised by the research gathered in the issue. It will provide a forum for interested people in and outside of the university to reflect on the intersections which may, or may not, exist between studies of sexuality and gender, and studies of the nation.

Speakers will include: Heather Yeung, Timothy C. Baker, Churnjeet Mahn, Susannah Thompson, Nat Raha, Iain Morrison, Carole Jones, Eleanor Byrne, and Colin Herd.

Lunch will be included. The event is free to attend but registration is required. We encourage attendance from across the UK; funding to cover travel expenses is available (please email darryl.peers@stu.mmu.ac.uk with the amount required).

‘Queer Form in Scottish Writing’

Scottish Literary Review 16/1 (Spring/Summer 2024) – contents

• Queer Nostalgia and Island Time in J. M. Barrie and Compton Mackenzie (Timothy C. Baker)
• Called Back: Reading Backwards in Ali Smith (Eleanor Byrne)
• Collapse, Demolition and Queer Landscapes (Jack Halberstam)
• ‘In spite of, to spite’: Trans Figuring in Shola von Reinhold’s Lote (2020) (Carole Jones)
• The Uses of Queer Scottish Form (Churnjeet Mahn)
• Poems in Letters: Callie Gardner’s ‘Letteriness’ (Iain Morrison)
• ‘I Name Myself Zami’: Maud Sulter’s Queer Form (Susannah Thompson)
• The Breaks, With Morgan (Heather H. Yeung)

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Haste Ye Back (again): Editing the Memoir of Dorothy K. Haynes

5 March, 5.30–7.30 p.m., Boyd Orr Building, University Avenue Glasgow, G12 8SP

Free Event – All Welcome

First published in 1973, Haste Ye Back is a lively and intimate portrayal of Aberlour Orphanage in Banffshire, where Dorothy K. Haynes (1918–1987) spent four formative years in her childhood. Best known as a writer of gothic and supernatural fiction, here Haynes’s vivid imagination brings to life the residents, caretakers and stories of the institution that irrevocably shaped her.

In this new edition, the complete text of Haste Ye Back is reprinted alongside additional material by Haynes: three previously unpublished reminiscences on Aberlour Orphanage, and ‘The Head’, the winner of the 1947 Tom-Gallon Trust Award and a fine example of the author’s haunting short fiction. Opening with a fresh and considered look at Haynes’s life and work, this volume re-introduces a long-neglected writer of striking originality.

Dr Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is a published scholar and short story writer with a wide range of research interests, from memory studies to textual editing. He is the author of The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow (2021), the co-editor of The Prose of Allan Ramsay (2024), and the editor of John Galt’s The Last of the Lairds(forthcoming 2025).

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