Scottish Review of Books

The Lost Poets at the National Library of Scotland by Scottish Review of Books

This is a recording of the opening seminar for the second season of the Scottish Review of Books Emerging Critics Programme, held at the National Library of Scotland in April 2018. Jan Rutherford chaired the event, which features contributions from Alan Taylor, Rosemary Goring, Alan Bett, and Laura Waddell. The programme is supported by Creative Scotland and the recording was made by the National Library of Scotland with full permission of all involved.

This is a recording of Muriel Spark, the Crème de la Crème, an event presented by the Edinburgh International Book Festival in association with publisher Birlinn Limited and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh. It was held at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on 31st January 2018 to celebrate the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth. The event is introduced by Nick Barley, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and is hosted by Alan Taylor, Editor of the Scottish Review of Books and Rosemary Goring, Literary Editor of the Herald. The event was supported by Creative Scotland and recorded with the kind permission of all participants.

Kristian Kerr talks with Emerging Critics mentor Dave Coates about expanding review coverage to include a variety of voices, challenging our conscious and unconscious biases as readers and writers, connections between academic and journalistic literary criticism, and the knotty issue of money.

In this episode David Robinson tells Kristian Kerr about his first meeting with his four mentees, who have been writing reviews of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Discussion topics include writing for the public, keeping a reader’s attention, reading each other’s work and being confident without being glib.

Kristian Kerr talks with Emerging Critics mentor and Creative Scotland Literature Officer Kaite Welsh. Kaite offers perspectives on reviewing for print and online platforms and the complementary relationship between the two. Other areas of conversation include pitching to editors and the editorial process; book vlogging and the old chestnut of books coverage on TV; criticism within in the literary ecosystem and its economic realities.

This conversation with Literary Editor Rosemary Goring offers perspective on the current practice of reviewing. Rosemary and Kristian discuss criticism as surgical and precise as well as being more broadly diagnostic of the health of a culture. The conversation ranges across the health of the profession too, and Rosemary reflects on the changes in the commissioning of reviews that she’s seen across her career and on hope for the future.

Editor Alan Taylor and Kristian Kerr discuss the Emerging Critics Programme, a partnership between the SRB and Creative Scotland, established to mentor new voices in cultural criticism. Topics include the state of criticism in Scotland today, the centrality of newspapers to cultural commentary, how we might adopt and adapt to new formats – all with a liberal sprinkling of anecdotes from the annals of Scottish reviewing. This is the first episode in the Emerging Critics Miniseries.