Scotland and the Scottish Diaspora
"It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there." -- Irvine Welsh (1958 - ), Scots novelist, short story writer, playwright, author of Trainspotting among many other works).
All my life I have been interested in the history of Scotland and the profound consequences of the Scottish diaspora throughout the world. Scotland and the Scots are appealing in so many ways -- the beauty of the land- and seascapes, the food and drink, the extraordinarily resourceful and creative people, the dramatic history from antiquity to the present, the great literature and history and philosophy and religion. The subjects are themselves enough to inspire writing, but there is great satisfaction in the fact that the Scots have lived up to the subjects on their own writ.
Over many years I have researched the history of Cumberland Valley, and I have often talked about the Scots, the Scots-Irish, and the settlement of this part of the New World by these willing and not-so-willing exiles. In recognition of the history and significance of the Scots to our area, I fly the Saltire and carry these books and cds. I am always on the lookout for more.
P.S. Due to listing limitations, I have moved Ian Rankin and Denise Mina, two fine writers of the Scots Noir movement, over to our International Mystery page.
King Hereafter
King Hereafter
ack in print by popular demand–"A stunning revelation of the historical Macbeth, harsh and brutal and eloquent." —Washington Post Book World.
With the same meticulous scholarship and narrative legerdemain she brought to her hugely popular Lymond Chronicles, our foremost historical novelist travels further into the past. In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett’s stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland. Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue. He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.
Dunnett depicts Macbeth’s transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself. She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable–and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.
Dorothy Dunnett was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. She is the author of the Lymond Chronicles; the House of Niccolò novels; seven mysteries; King Hereafter, an epic novel about Macbeth; and the text of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photographs by David Paterson, on which she collaborated with her husband, Sir Alastair Dunnett. In 1992 she was awarded the Office of the British Empire for services to literature. Lady Dunnett died in 2001.